A few years ago, a troubling phenomenon began to spread in U.S. education: Students were not showing up to school. This was not particularly surprising. Schools had shut down in the spring of 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and some did not fully reopen until fall 2021. Quarantines for Covid symptoms and exposures […]
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Wanted in South Korea: Imperialism-Free Cherry Blossoms
Shin Joon Hwan, an ecologist, walked along a road lined with cherry trees on the verge of blooming last week, examining the fine hairs around their dark red buds. The flowers in Gyeongju, South Korea, an ancient capital, belong to a common Japanese variety called the Yoshino, or Tokyo cherry. Mr. Shin’s advocacy group wants […]
Read MoreJosh Kushner and Karlie Kloss Plan to Revive Life Magazine
Kushner and Kloss take over Life magazine Life, the iconic photography-focused chronicler of the 20th century, has taken on many forms, including a weekly magazine, a website and the occasional special issue. Now, it is set to resume regular print publication, thanks to a deal between Barry Diller’s IAC and Josh Kushner, the venture capitalist […]
Read MoreThe World’s Unpopular Leaders
By many measures, President Biden is very unpopular. Since at least World War II, no president has had a worse disapproval rating at this point in his term. Relative to his international peers, however, Biden looks much better. Many leaders of developed democracies have disapproval ratings even higher than Biden’s, as this chart by my […]
Read MoreWhy Biden, Macron and More Leaders Have Low Approval Ratings
By many measures, President Biden is very unpopular. Since at least World War II, no president has had a worse disapproval rating at this point in his term. Relative to his international peers, however, Biden looks much better. Many leaders of developed democracies have disapproval ratings even higher than Biden’s, as this chart by my […]
Read MoreAmerica’s Affordable Housing Crisis
President Biden worries about high housing costs. So do Republicans in Congress. The consensus reflects a major problem: Tens of millions of families, across red and blue states, struggle with rent and home prices. The reason is a longstanding housing shortage. But action in Washington won’t make a huge difference. America’s affordable housing crisis is […]
Read MoreWhy BlackRock’s Larry Fink Wants to Rethink Retirement
BlackRock’s chief wants to rethink a fiscal time bomb As the chairman and C.E.O. of the asset management giant BlackRock, Larry Fink commands attention from companies and governments, helping spearhead movements like socially driven business and the need for companies to fight climate change. In his latest letter to investors, published on Tuesday, Fink weighs […]
Read MoreTrump’s Financial Squeeze
Donald Trump has 10 days to come up with a $175 million bond in his New York civil fraud case. After that, he may be on the hook for the full penalty in the case: almost half a billion dollars. Could this situation affect his presidential campaign? Yes, it could. I will explain how in […]
Read MoreChallenging Abortion, Again
How safe is it to take abortion pills? The F.D.A., the nation’s authority on drug regulation, says that it’s very safe. But the agency’s judgment is the topic of a sweeping challenge that the Supreme Court will hear tomorrow. The case could curtail Americans’ access to mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen […]
Read MoreA New Game from The Times
I still hear from readers who learned about the Connections game from this newsletter and now play it every day. Today, I want to tell you about The Times’s newest game, called Strands. It’s another quick, entertaining way to exercise your brain. Strands is a word search with a few twists. Each day, the puzzle […]
Read More‘Cherry on the Cake’: How China Views the U.S. Crackdown on TikTok
Dan Wang has been a leading observer of contemporary China for years. As a tech analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm, and through his well-read newsletter, Wang has charted the country’s rise as a fast-growing high-tech economy and, more recently, its slowdown and rising tensions with the United States. Wang is now a visiting […]
Read MoreThe Music That Made Us
There’s a scene in Andrew Haigh’s recent film “All of Us Strangers” where we see Adam, played by the Irish actor Andrew Scott, working on a screenplay to the strains of Fine Young Cannibals’s 1985 ska track “Johnny Come Home.” He types the scene heading: “EXT. SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987.” An establishing shot. We’re going back […]
Read MoreHow Peer Pressure Affects Voting
The political scientists Chryl Laird and Ismail White used a creative strategy several years ago to study the voting patterns of Black Americans. Laird and White took advantage of the fact that some surveys are conducted through in-person interviews — and keep track of the interviewer’s race — while other surveys are done online. In […]
Read MoreRace and Politics
After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many political scientists and pundits came forth with a simple explanation. Trump had won, they said, because of white Americans’ racial resentment. These analysts looked at surveys and argued that the voters who had allowed Trump to win were distinguished not by social class, economic worries or […]
Read MoreThe Hotel That Owed Over $300,000 in Water Bills
Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about the city’s efforts to collect on what it says are delinquent water bills. We’ll also see why a judge decided not to punish Donald Trump’s onetime fixer for fake legal citations concocted by an artificial intelligence program. The Hotel Hayden promotes itself as “a buzz-worthy boutique […]
Read MoreAn American Slowdown
Since its inception, the U.S. has relied on population growth to keep its economy pumping. New generations of native-born Americans and immigrants enter the work force; they produce goods and services and then spend their income, in a cycle that drives supply, demand and growth. They also pay taxes that fund programs like Social Security […]
Read MoreGambia and the Campaign Against Cutting
Yesterday, lawmakers in Gambia voted to advance legislation that would legalize female genital cutting. Local analysts believe it is likely to pass. Women have achieved so much social progress worldwide. Yet genital cutting is still on the rise. Today, 230 million women and girls around the world have been cut, a 15 percent rise from […]
Read MoreThe Activist Investor Dan Loeb Enters The Chip Wars
A different kind of battle for Third Point A small computer chip design company, R2 Semiconductor, has been notching wins in a potentially big patent fight against Intel over the past few months — a dispute that could force Intel to stop selling several chip lines in Europe. Behind R2’s legal war is one of […]
Read MoreThe Realtors’ Big Defeat
Free-market economic theory suggests that the American real estate market should not have been able to exist as it has for decades. Americans have long paid unusually high commissions to real estate agents. The typical commission in the U.S. has been almost 6 percent, compared with 4.5 percent in Germany, 2.5 percent in Australia and […]
Read MoreSelection Sunday
Happy Selection Sunday! Green beer and lucky leprechauns aside, today is one of America’s great (unofficial) holidays. It’s the day the 68-team brackets for the N.C.A.A. men’s and women’s basketball tournaments are revealed. Tonight’s unveiling of the matchups may bring back a feeling you haven’t had since digesting the prompt for that 10th grade U.S. […]
Read MoreIn Search of Spring
When does spring begin? For some, it’s the second Sunday in March, when we turn our clocks forward by an hour in the United States. For others, it’s when they first realize they’ve finished dinner and it’s still light out, or when the first crocuses poke up through the snow. Is it when you can […]
Read MoreThe Big Dilemma Facing ByteDance’s US Investors
What’s next for ByteDance’s U.S. investors? As Beijing makes it increasingly clear that it opposes efforts by Congress to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the popular video app — government officials in China said American lawmakers were acting like a “bandit” — the tech giant’s U.S. backers are increasingly finding themselves in […]
Read MoreAmerica Pulls Back from Ukraine
For two years, Ukraine has relied on American weapons to fight Russian invaders. It has bombarded Russian lines with U.S. artillery, destroyed tanks with Javelin missiles and stopped aerial attacks with Patriot launchers. But American support has sharply declined. House Republicans have blocked additional aid to Ukraine, and the Biden administration cannot send many more […]
Read MoreShould China Own TikTok?
To understand why the House of Representatives will vote today on a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the platform, it helps to look at a few recent news stories: Despite low unemployment and falling inflation, TikTok is full of viral videos bemoaning the U.S. economy. One popular group of posts […]
Read MoreConvicting Politicians
In the last decade, it has proved surprisingly hard to put politicians accused of corruption behind bars. Appeals courts have reversed several convictions. And juries have occasionally thought the officeholders’ behavior didn’t meet the high standard for corruption. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who was arraigned yesterday in a federal bribery case, is both […]
Read MoreCould Donald Trump Save TikTok?
Trump’s TikTok U-turn TikTok users have continued to flood the social media platform — and lawmakers’ inboxes — with pleas to halt a bill that would force its Chinese owners to divest or face a ban in the U.S. That effort to keep TikTok online has now attracted some unlikely backers, including Donald Trump. A […]
Read MoreThe Fourth Anniversary of the Covid Pandemic
Four years ago today, society began to shut down. Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President Donald Trump […]
Read MoreCabbage Is Having a Moment
In a world in which it’s hard for a vegetable to get a break, cabbage is winning. Cabbage has been a global culinary workhorse for centuries. (China grows the most; Russia eats the most.) It has fed generations of American immigrants. But now, a vegetable that can make your house smell like a 19th-century tenement […]
Read MoreCramming for the Oscars
I’m in competition with no one but myself in trying to view all the major-category nominees for the Oscars before the ceremony tomorrow night. I’m doing well this year, probably because the slate is fairly small: Most of the films with acting and screenplay nominations are also contenders for best picture. If I can get […]
Read MoreIs Hungary a Model for Trump?
Tomorrow in Florida, Donald Trump will host Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, whom Trump often praises. “He is a very great leader, a very strong man,” Trump has said. “Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong.” In a recent newsletter, I spoke with some of my colleagues covering Trump’s campaign about […]
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