More from our inbox: To the Editor: Re “The Power of Art in a Political Age,” by David Brooks (column, March 5): Like Mr. Brooks, I often feel that “I’m in a daily struggle not to become a shallower version of myself.” As a teenager, I lose track of my own thoughts in the flood […]

Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. By Ezra Klein Opinion Columnist In 2018, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google — and not one of the tech executives known for overstatement — said, “A.I. is probably the most […]

Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. By Jamelle Bouie Opinion Columnist Next week I’m giving a talk on journalism and democracy, and I thought I would use the newsletter this weekend to think out loud about the subject. […]

The air-raid siren’s wail woke Yoshiko Hashimoto from her sleep. It was just after midnight on March 10, 1945, when the first of hundreds of American bombers appeared over Tokyo. Incendiary bombs soon crashed through tile rooftops, igniting fires in the surrounding thicket of tinderbox homes. Hashimoto and her family fled for their lives. They […]

The self-styled “greenest member” of Congress is a Republican from rural Kentucky. He lives in an off-the-grid home he built himself, using timbers cut and rock quarried from his family cattle farm. He pipes in water from a nearby pond, and powers the home with solar panels and a battery from a wrecked Tesla that […]

On Tuesday evening, two news reports caught my attention. The first was an Emerson College poll of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire. Donald Trump holds an incredible 41-point lead over Ron DeSantis in the state that rescued Trump’s primary campaign after a second-place finish in Iowa in 2016. This result is in line with […]

Hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro Produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur Edited by Stephanie Joyce and Kaari Pitkin Engineered by Pat McCusker Original music by Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud Listen to and follow ‘First Person’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon Music When it comes to day-to-day decisions about whether strangers […]

Did a lab leak cause Covid? U.S. lawmakers opened hearings yesterday into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The hearing, which quickly became politically charged, underscored how difficult it may be to ascertain the origins of Covid-19. Republicans on the House panel investigating the pandemic’s origins made an aggressive case that the virus may have […]

When a Norfolk Southern train carrying nearly 116,000 gallons of vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last month, local officials made a pivotal decision: to drain the highly toxic chemical into a ditch and set it on fire in a “controlled burn” to avoid a catastrophic explosion. Officials didn’t mention that the plume could […]

Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist In the responses to a recent death-of-the-humanities dirge, a long reported piece by Nathan Heller for The New Yorker on the decline of the English major, you […]