The Musk backlash isn’t over yet On Thursday was meant to be a big day for Tesla and its investors, as the electric vehicle maker finally began delivering to customers its much-ballyhooed Cybertruck pickup — its first new model in more than three years. Instead, Tesla’s shares fell nearly 2 percent. Some of that loss […]
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Should you rent or buy your next home? It is a question that millions of people — especially younger adults who don’t own a home — wrestle with. It’s also a subject that I have written about in The Times for almost 20 years. Today, I want to revisit it, inspired by the interest of […]
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For decades, Susan Sarandon’s acting career thrived alongside a robust interest in political activism, which often placed her well to the left even of Hollywood’s liberal mainstream. As she starred in films like “Bull Durham,” “Thelma & Louise” and “Dead Man Walking,” for which she won an Academy Award, she became a familiar, outspoken figure […]
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In our polarized country, it counts as news whenever members of one political party deeply disagree on an issue. The Israel-Hamas war has become an example for the Democratic Party. Many Democrats — including members of the Biden administration — are divided over Israel’s war strategy. That divide has rightly received a lot of attention. […]
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Is the U.S. in the middle of a shoplifting wave? Target and other retail chains have warned of widespread theft. News outlets have amplified the story. On social media, people have posted videos of thieves looting stores. But the increase in shoplifting appears to be limited to a few cities, rather than being truly national. […]
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Israel and Hamas have extended their truce for two days — through tomorrow — which will bring the pause in fighting to six days. The deal is a sign that both sides have benefited from it. What comes next is less clear, though. For Israel’s leaders in particular, the pause has created a strategic dilemma. […]
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The consumer is back — but for how long? Black Friday and today’s Cyber Monday shopping bonanzas hold outsize political significance this year with the retailing events emerging as key recession and inflation indicators. So far, so good. Bargain hunters turned out in force for Black Friday sales, and Cyber Monday is forecast to be […]
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Last year, Tyhran Khosrovian and Olena Holeha survived the siege of Mariupol. They fled Ukraine, as millions have since the war began, and became refugees in the United States. After arriving in Brooklyn, they slept on a leaky air mattress in an apartment they shared with Khosrovian’s family. A grant from Catholic Charities of the […]
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Will Shortz celebrated his 30th anniversary as The Times’s Crossword editor this week. He is one of only four Crossword editors since 1942, when the paper began publishing puzzles as a way to offer relief to readers overwhelmed by war news. “It is possible there will now be bleak blackout hours — or if not […]
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This past week, The New York Times Book Review published its list of 100 Notable Books of 2023. On Tuesday, a handful of those titles will be named the Review’s 10 Best Books of the year. The list is a closely guarded secret, the product of many months of passionate closed-door debate presided over by […]
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There’s no shortage of reasons to be alarmed by climate change these days. This year is almost certain to be the hottest in recorded history. Extreme weather is wreaking havoc around the globe. Fossil fuel production and emissions are still rising, and world leaders are not moving fast enough. But take a moment to imagine: […]
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Good morning. You taking care of yourself? Getting some “me” time? I don’t write much about feelings, generally, but this is a day that can be thick with them: judgy siblings; over-served cousins; ungrateful offspring; that silent stranger who arrived with your aunt and who might be her boyfriend, it’s hard to say. Here’s what […]
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It was a relatively quiet wildfire season in the U.S. But there is no summer vacation for the Tallac Hotshots, a federal firefighting crew based near Lake Tahoe in California. The crew members spent early July in triple-digit heat in Arizona, fighting a wildfire for 14 straight days. From there they traveled to a thickly […]
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OpenAI’s structural messiness The future of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT kick-started an arms race in artificial intelligence, has grown even cloudier. A majority of its workers called on its board to resign after ousting Sam Altman as C.E.O. over how fast to commercialize its technology. The conflict further underscores the peculiar oversight atop some of the […]
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If they had been the plot of a science fiction movie, or an episode of “Succession,” the events at OpenAI last weekend would have seemed a little over-the-top. A secret board coup! Fears of killer A.I.! A star C.E.O., betrayed by his chief scientist! A middle-of-the-night staff revolt that threatens to change the balance of […]
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What next for an A.I. leader? Over just three days, the landscape for artificial intelligence has been reshaped drastically. On Friday morning, Sam Altman was the C.E.O. of OpenAI, the leader in commercializing generative A.I. through ChatGPT. By Monday, he had not only been fired by his board — he had also joined Microsoft, the […]
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There is one change, so simple it can be described in just six words, that could lift millions of people out of poverty and expand the world’s fifth-largest economy: Get more Indian women paid jobs. In many other countries, female labor-force participation has propelled economic growth. But India has one of the world’s lowest rates […]
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A beautiful person is so often a confrontation. Even in silence, symmetrical features announce their presence and elicit a reaction: desire, admiration, curiosity, resentment, belittlement, rage or envy. The response is rarely neutral. In this way, beautiful people are different from comedians who have to work for a crowd’s attention. Comics choreograph their lines, pauses […]
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Last Thanksgiving, just as a jubilant Santa Claus was making his way across 34th Street on TV, I noticed something alarming in the kitchen of my childhood home. The oven I had preheated for my stuffing had not, in fact, heated. My dad, flashlight in hand and flanked by a gaggle of panicked observers, crouched […]
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I want to make clear that the subject of today’s newsletter is especially difficult. It involves a Boston University study of athletes who played contact sports — like football — as children and died before turning 30, many by suicide. The Times has just published an interactive article about the study, including childhood videos of […]
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Negotiations in Congress over a warrantless surveillance law are intensifying as it nears its expiration date. The debate has come during what national security officials say is a surge in threats fueled by the Israel-Hamas war. But whether lawmakers will reach consensus and pass any bill that would renew the law, known as Section 702, […]
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A then-obscure think tank named the Roosevelt Institute released a report in 2015 that called for a new approach to economic policy. It was unabashedly progressive, befitting the history of the institute, which was created by trusts honoring Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The report called for higher taxes on the rich, a higher minimum wage, […]
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Streaming technology has allowed people to spend much more time watching entertainment than they did in the past. They can binge entire shows if they enjoy the first episode. They can watch almost any movie on an airplane flight or a subway ride. Normally, a big increase in the use of a product also increases […]
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Maryanne Trump Barry, a former federal judge who was an older sister of Donald J. Trump and served as both his protector and critic throughout their lives, has died. She was 86. She died at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two of them […]
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Many Democrats have come to believe that abortion access is the solution to their political problems. This week’s election results — with Ohio guaranteeing abortion access in a landslide and Democrats winning in both Virginia and Kentucky — support this notion. But I continue to think that recent elections offer a more complex picture, and […]
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Yesterday’s elections went well for the Democratic Party. Gov. Andy Beshear won re-election in normally red Kentucky, 53 percent to 48 percent, by emphasizing his support for abortion rights and the economic benefits of Biden administration policies. In increasingly red Ohio, voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that keeps abortion legal until roughly 23 weeks […]
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Where the economy is working (and where it isn’t) With a year to go before Election Day, polls increasingly show that American voters believe next year will be a rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump — with the former president in the lead in key battleground states despite his legal troubles (more on that […]
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Seven questions 1. Will abortion rights keep winning? At least three states are worth watching: Ohioans will vote on a referendum to protect abortion access until about 23 weeks of pregnancy. If it passes, it will be the seventh straight victory for abortion rights in state referendums since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade […]
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Economic perceptions are hurting Biden more than ever There was little good news for President Biden in the latest Times/Siena poll of 2024 battlegrounds, which found him trailing Donald Trump in five of six key states one year before voters head to the polls. (That’s despite Trump being nearly as unpopular and fighting multiple legal […]
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With President Biden having fallen behind Donald Trump in the early 2024 polls, Trump’s strategy seems fairly straightforward: more of the same. Trump will portray Biden as old, inflation as high, immigration as out of control and the nation as weak. All these arguments play into the concerns of many voters. But what might Biden […]
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When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he ran as the electability candidate — a broadly appealing, moderate Democrat from Scranton, Pa., who could defeat Donald Trump. There aren’t many signs of his old electoral strength in a new set of New York Times/Siena College polls of the six states likely to decide […]
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