Empty storefronts dot most of the blocks around my downtown neighborhood these days and have overtaken some of them. Once a buzzy destination for shoppers and diners, downtown today frequently looks deserted, its visitors presumably repelled by reports of violent crime, homelessness and blight. Upper-floor offices, once packed with white-collar workers eager to hit the […]

The New York Times Audio app includes podcasts and narrated articles from the newsroom and other publishers, as well as exclusive new shows that we’re making available to readers for a limited time. Download the audio app here. Earlier this year, a short clip mocking trans people from the show “South Park” went viral. Influential […]

Olatunde Sobomehin, the chief executive and co-founder of StreetCode Academy, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that offers free tech classes to people from communities of color, thought that taking a sabbatical would be impossible. But his thinking began to change as he read and learned more about the practice. Sobomehin came to view sabbaticals as a […]

ADRE, Chad — The janjaweed are back. The Arab militiamen who some call by that fearsome name — a term that loosely translates as “devils on horseback” — stopped Adam Abakar Mahmoud and his cousin Siddig Abdulrahman at a checkpoint on the perilous road to Chad earlier this month. They were in a truck fleeing […]

The end of Roe v. Wade spawned a momentous realignment of abortion politics and legal strategy in the United States. Almost a third of states in this country now ban almost all abortions, while more than a third have passed new laws protecting abortion rights — with many legal battles playing out in state and federal […]

One of our most urgent national problems is addiction to drugs and alcohol. It now kills about a quarter-million Americans a year, leaves many others homeless and causes unimaginable heartache in families across the country — including the family living in the White House. Hunter Biden, who has written about his tangles with crack cocaine […]

India is arguably the most important swing nation in global politics. It is influential enough to shift the balance of power, and its allegiances are neither obvious nor consistent. India is both the world’s most populous country and the only country among the top 10 economies that has not clearly chosen a side in what […]

The political right’s exhausting and cruel war on “wokeness” is now aligning with the efforts of some Muslim Americans to attack the L.G.B.T.Q. community under the guise of protecting religious freedoms and parental rights. After enduring a gantlet of scapegoating after 9/11, you’d think we Muslims would have learned. As a practicing Muslim American raising […]

More from our inbox: To the Editor: Re “Police in Minneapolis Blatantly Disregarded Civil Rights, U.S. Says” (front page, June 17): Once a police culture becomes entrenched, whether it is good or bad, it is very difficult to change it. But it can be done. I am a retired deputy police chief with over 25 […]

Hosted by Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon Music The New York Times Audio app includes podcasts, narrated articles from the newsroom and other publishers, as well as exclusive new shows — including this one — which we’re making available […]