By Kara Swisher Sacha Baron Cohen was busy last year. In “The Trial of The Chicago 7,” he portrayed 1960s antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman. In “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” he revived his role as a Kazakh journalist touring America. These films may seem historical or comedic, respectively, but Baron Cohen says their themes — abuse of […]

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit New York this spring, Jessica Fink wanted to help. She’s been a nurse for 15 years, and she moved from Delaware to serve at Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island. Ms. Fink told me she was “ready to contribute,” to care for Covid patients. But once she got to […]

Spacs, or “special purpose acquisition companies”, might soon be coming to Singapore. The Singapore Exchange (SGX) is considering allowing some version of Wall Street’s hottest investment product, which provides investors with an unusual route to taking stakes in innovative companies, to list in Singapore this year. SGX is about to launch a public consultation exercise […]

Few see Judge Merrick Garland, President Biden’s pick for attorney general, as a progressive who will reform the criminal legal system. But the Biden administration recently acknowledged that mass incarceration does not make us safer. And as the nation’s chief federal prosecutor, if confirmed, Judge Garland will have the power to prioritize federal bail reform […]

Syria’s economy in distress. By Natasha Frost Good morning. We’re covering Syria’s crisis point, a new opposition party in Russia and memorials to epidemics past. Syria’s economy reaches a crisis point Nearly a decade into its civil war, Syria is in extreme distress. This month, the Syrian pound reached an all-time low against the dollar […]

Catherine Buteau, a 33-year-old marketing and communications specialist in Montreal, woke up on Feb. 7 to a lot of missed calls on her phone. Her relatives in Haiti had been desperately calling her. Her father, mother and aunt had been snatched from their beds in Port-au-Prince in the middle of the night. “No one knew […]

In 1995, 12-year-old Eddie Bisch was on a family fishing trip in the Florida Keys when his father, Ed Bisch, splurged and rented a boat on Islamorada. The mahi-mahi were everywhere; when Eddie snagged one it jumped so crazily on his line he screamed. That memorable Florida fishing trip would be their last. Earlier that […]

When we started talking, it was pure sex, simple as that. We met the first week of lockdown — online, of course. My Tinder profile was a picture of me unzipping a jumpsuit, the words “social distancing is sexy” barely covering the middle of my chest. (I don’t know why I did this.) His profile […]

By Ezra Klein One thing I want to do on this show is give space to truly radical ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations. And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one of those ideas. She calls it “open democracy,” and the premise is simple: What we call […]

I spent my 13th birthday locked in a hotel room in Toronto. It was July 2000, and I was on a press tour to promote the movie “Thomas and the Magic Railroad.” I had been promised a day off for my birthday, but when I arrived from Los Angeles the night before, I learned I […]