I have attended commencements of all kinds throughout my career, and I can tell you that some of the best are in prisons.Over and over, I have spoken at these commencements with incarcerated men and women who acknowledge the awful choices or stupid mistakes they made, the strangers or loved ones they hurt, yet emerge from prison renewed through higher education. While 95 percent of the people incarcerated will come home one day, they often return to the same cycles that led them to prison in the first place. Through college coursework, they are able to reflect on their past, develop a clearer vision for their future and gain the skills to contribute to their families and communities.One student told me that pursuing college while incarcerated was the first time he had moral and academic credibility with his family. The potential for higher education in prison to change lives is the reason that I worked to expand these programs when I was the U.S. secretary of education and president of a national education civil rights organization, and do so now as chancellor of the State University of New York.I believe so deeply in the transformative power of education because teachers saved my life.When I was 8 years old, in October of 1983, my mother died suddenly from a heart attack. It was indescribably devastating. I then lived alone with my father, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s until he died when I was 12. During those years with my father, no one outside our home knew he was sick, and I didn’t know why he acted the way he did.Some nights he would talk to me; some nights he wouldn’t say a word. Other nights he would be sad or angry, or even violent. Home was scary and unstable, but I was blessed to have New York City public schoolteachers who made school a place that was safe, nurturing, academically rigorous and engaging.If not for Allan Osterweil, my teacher in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at P.S. 276 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, I would be in prison or dead. Amid the darkness of my home life, Mr. Osterweil gave me a sense of hope and purpose. In his classroom, we read The New York Times every day. We learned the capital and leader of every country in the world. We did productions of Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about five minutes.Former President Donald J. Trump’s sweep of the Iowa caucuses was broad and deep.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:5 Takeaways From Trump’s Runaway Victory in the Iowa Caucuses, by Lisa Lerer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan SwanWhat to Know as Trump Faces Another Defamation Trial by E. Jean Carroll, by Benjamin Weiser and Maggie Haberman, with Maria CramerSenate to Vote on Potential Freeze to Israel Aid as Democrats Question Conduct of War, by Karoun DemirjianU.S. Defense Secretary Is Released From the Hospital After 2 Weeks, by Eric SchmittIceland Faces ‘New Chapter’ of Seismic Activity as Lava Menaces Town, by Egill Bjarnason and Emma Bubola75th Emmy Awards Ceremony: ‘Succession’ Wins Emmy for Best Drama and ‘The Bear’ Best Comedy, by John KoblinJessica Metzger and More

One faction of prospective nominees appears focused on revenge, another on calming markets and a third on relentlessly — perhaps hopelessly — cutting people and budgets.President-elect Donald J. Trump’s final flurry of cabinet picks and other appointments rounded out what his aides described as a unified, loyal, MAGA-driven administration. But scratch the surface and there are at least three distinct factions and a range of ideologies, barely suppressed to get through the rigors of the confirmation process.There is a revenge team, led by prospective nominees with instructions to rip apart the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, hunting down the so-called deep state and anyone who participated in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.There is a calm-the-markets team, which Mr. Trump hopes will be led by Scott Bessent, the Wall Street billionaire who Mr. Trump chose for Treasury secretary. Mr. Bessent can recite the MAGA lines about deregulation and lower taxes but would likely try to make sure Mr. Trump’s most extreme solutions, like inflation-inducing tariffs on foreign goods, do not end the post-election stock market surge.And then there is a government shrinkage team, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose goals are wildly ambitious, to put it mildly. They want to carve what Mr. Musk says will be “at least” $2 trillion from the annual federal budget, a figure that exceeds the annual cost of salaries for every federal employee. (For the record, the total federal budget in the 2024 fiscal year was $6.75 trillion.)How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.Diversity of ideology and opinion is usually seen as a strength, not a defect, of presidential cabinets. But if there is a surprise about Mr. Trump’s choices in recent days, it is the range of experiences and worldviews that in some cases lie just beneath a veneer of recently declared Make America Great Again loyalty — and loyalty to Mr. Trump himself. It is hard to imagine a few of his picks sitting comfortably at a Trump rally.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

U Tun Min Latt was placed under sanctions last year by the United States for supplying drones and aircraft parts to the military regime in Myanmar.A wealthy Myanmar arms broker with close ties to the leader of Myanmar’s brutal military regime was acquitted on Tuesday by a Bangkok court on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, raising fears that he will be free to resume his activities aiding the junta.U Tun Min Latt, who was placed under sanctions by the United States last year for supplying the Myanmar regime with weapons, had spent 16 months in a Thai jail awaiting trial. The case is the first known instance of a close associate of Myanmar’s army commander, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, being arrested abroad and put on trial since the military seized power in a coup three years ago.The Thai authorities had accused Mr. Tun Min Latt and three associates of engaging in a scheme to launder drug money by using it to buy electricity in Thailand and sending it across the border to Myanmar. But the Thai criminal court found that the record of bank transactions presented by prosecutors did not provide sufficient evidence to prove the charges.With the ruling, about two dozen family members and supporters of the accused burst into applause in the courtroom. Some wept tears of joy.But Phil Robertson, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch in Asia, expressed disappointment.“It’s hard to believe that a Burmese tycoon that many have referred to as being junta leader Min Aung Hlaing’s bagman got off,” he said. “The only people happy with this outcome are the junta generals who are increasingly desperate to find resources and, quite clearly, Tun Min Latt has proved very helpful in that regard in the past.”In recent months, an armed resistance made up of pro-democracy forces and ethnic rebel groups has reported gaining ground against the military, saying it has seized hundreds of military outposts and dozens of towns in Myanmar’s border regions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

We can rant about the Senate and rail against Fox News. The ranting is warranted and the railing just. We can survey all the Republican efforts to subvert the will of voters, size up the hatred that so many Americans feel for one another and see the makings of a civil war.Or we can wonder how urgently all those forces would matter — whether they would have moved us this fast toward this brink — without the impossibly fragile ego of one insatiably needy man.Does a great nation’s future hinge on a rejected president’s pride?I thought about that on Wednesday morning as I listened to Donald Trump’s interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR. All these months later, Trump was still fixated on the inferior size of the crowds that turned out for Biden in 2020, still prattling on about it, still insistent: I’m bigger! I’m better! That was before he hung up on Inskeep, who had the temerity not to surrender readily to Trump’s delusion that the election was stolen.I thought about Trump’s delicate psyche and our delicate state when my Monday and Tuesday news feeds filled with his attack on Senator Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican. “Is he crazy or just stupid?” Trump said in a written statement. “I will never endorse this jerk again.” Such elevated language, and the prompt for it? Rounds had merely acknowledged that Biden won the 2020 election.I think about Trump’s narcissism every time we get a closer glimpse into what he was doing and how he was feeling during the Jan. 6 riot, when those ghastly images filled our screens. What churned our stomachs salved his vanity. As my colleague Maureen Dowd wrote last weekend, “Rather than admit that he lost re-election, Trump was willing to egg on a seditious cult to overturn the election. You can just picture him sitting there in the White House, surrounded by McDonald’s wrappers, thrilled at the TV scenes of MAGA hooligans attacking the police.”His insistence on an inverted version of history — one that doesn’t merely flatter him but that turns him into a noble martyr — is one of the driving forces behind many Republicans’ anti-democratic maneuvers and their indulgence or outright promotion of conspiratorial thinking. There’s no Big Lie without the Big Liar. And while, yes, this big liar is the product of dynamics in the electorate that he didn’t create, he turbocharges the ugliness with a relentlessness and perverse skill all his own.He must always reassure himself that he’s the king of the jungle. He must forever fluff his mane and amplify his roar.There has long been a (verbally sexist) “Great Man” theory of history, but with Trump we have a subset of that, or an annex to it: the great psychosis theory of history. One man’s pathological insecurity is — or can be — an entire country’s fate. That has been the case elsewhere before. Is it the case here now?Post-Ivy IgnominySenator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, left, and Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, on Capitol Hill in 2019.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOodles of acquaintances brought my attention to a recent article in The Atlantic, “How Ivy League Elites Turned Against Democracy,” by Stephen Marche, because of this withering claim within it: “What the Ivy League produces, in spades, on both the left and the right, is unwarranted confidence. Its institutions are hubris factories.” My acquaintances wanted my thoughts because I once wrote a book questioning the magical power that so many students and their parents attribute to such schools and because I now teach at an Ivy-esque institution, Duke.My thoughts are that Marche’s assessment applies accurately to some students at elite colleges but by no means to most of them. It’s a big overgeneralization.But his article — an excellent one, worth your time — has stuck with me for a different reason. It pointedly and perfectly captures a truism that we sometimes speed too quickly past and that has special relevance to events in American politics, and to the Republican Party in particular, over these past few years: People will sell out anyone and anything, including themselves, if it gets them to, or keeps them at, the top of the heap.How and why, Marche wonders, do the likes of Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who went to Stanford as an undergraduate and got his law degree at Yale, and Senator Ted Cruz, whose three years at Harvard Law were preceded by four at Princeton, incite anti-elite fury? And how and why do Hawley, Cruz and other lawmakers who make their careers in government fan the flames that would burn down the very institutions they inhabit?Marche describes the contradiction especially well in writing about the second of President Trump’s two secretaries of state: “Mike Pompeo graduated first in his class from West Point and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. When a man of those advantages oversees the hollowing out of the State Department, allows the president to fire inspectors general who displease him by their inspection, uses his position to cultivate donors for his party, and consistently bends the norms and destroys the traditions that have lifted him to power, what hope can there be for his country? If he cannot manage to keep faith with the system, who can?”Ouch and amen. But there’s a simple solution to the seemingly complicated riddle of Hawley, Cruz and Pompeo. And Marche provides it: Right now their surest path to power, or firmest grip on it, involves the theatrical trashing of their own trappings, the reinvention of themselves as characters in a story other than their own. They haven’t had some post-Ivy moral or philosophical epiphany. Their makeovers are fundamentally commercial: They sized up the current marketplace and manufactured what sells best.And for them — as for too many people in this age of runaway vanity — brand dictates belief.For the Love of SentencesHanya YanagiharaDavid Levenson/Getty Images“To Paradise,” by Hanya Yanagihara, has attracted extensive analysis, none more deft than a review in The Atlantic by Jordan Kisner: “Reading the novel delivers the thrilling, uncanny feeling of standing before an infinity mirror, numberless selves and rooms turning uncertainly before you, just out of reach.” (Thanks to Barbara Rothschild of Columbia, Mo., for nominating this.)In The New Yorker, Richard Brody has been on a tear. Here’s his appraisal of “Don’t Look Up,” which he calls “a clever film that’s short on wit. The difference is that wit is multifaceted, like a gem that, however small, offers different glimmers at different angles. Cleverness exhausts itself in a single glint and then repeats itself to infinity.” (Zino Vogiatzis, Timonium, Md.)And here he is on one of the less hallowed movies directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who died last week: “Before Michael Cimino’s ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ before Elaine May’s ‘Ishtar,’ there was the scandal of ‘At Long Last Love,’ which the critics of the time heaven’s-gated, leaving Bogdanovich ishtarred and feathered.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)Examining the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot in The Washington Post, Kate Woodsome wrote: “As the psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem teaches, over time, a person’s trauma can look like personality. Growing angry with the banal. Insomnia. Drinking. Scanning everywhere for threats. Maybe this is simply how you are. Or maybe you’re tying your shoes with broken fingers.” (Tricia Chatary, Middlebury, Vt. )And Rex Huppke was having none of it when he fired off this column for The Chicago Tribune, which observed: “A portion of the populace has slid from ‘it’s good to be smart’ to ‘being smart is elitist, so I’m going to follow the medical advice of this podcaster,’ a painfully common epitaph throughout the pandemic.” He added that Jan. 6 “will live in idiocy. It was the charge of the not-bright brigade.” (Helen Mooty, Seabrook, Texas)Now to The Times. Reviewing Carl Bernstein’s new memoir, “Chasing History,” about his beginnings as a reporter, the Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote: “At 77, he is entering his anecdotage.” (Nancy Mansbach, Waban, Mass., and Gordon Brown, Boulder, Colo.) Garner also described Bernstein’s youthful enthusiasm this way: “If he’d been a dog, his head would have always been outside the car window.” (Helaine Fendelman, Manhattan)Weighing in on the final weekend of regular-season N.F.L. games, Mike Tanier explained: “The New England Patriots (10-6) can improve their chances to win the A.F.C. East by beating the Miami Dolphins (8-8), who were eliminated from postseason contention last week, while the Buffalo Bills (10-6) can clinch the division by defeating the Jets, who were eliminated in 1972.” (Mark Cameron, Suquamish, Wash.) And here’s a bonus from Mike, on the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who ended up making it into the playoffs: “Ben Roethlisberger, who is expected to retire at season’s end, now throws and runs like a great-uncle playing a pickup game at a backyard cookout after three I.P.A.s and two helpings of potato salad.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J., and Christopher Bailey, Richmond, Va.)Reflecting on New York City’s new mayor, Ginia Bellafante observed: “Saturday marks the end of Eric Adams’s first week as the mayor of New York, a time he has used to successfully distinguish himself from his predecessor — taking the J train; holding meetings at 9 a.m., an hour that found Bill de Blasio still in sweatpants; riding a Citi Bike in a suit, horse-bit loafers and a rose-colored helmet coordinated to the hue of his tie. Whatever might come, this would not be a tenure of earth tones and lethargy and saturnine expressions.” (Debbie Deitcher, Manhattan)Taking the measure of Mehmet Oz, Annaliese Griffin wrote: “He’s rightly understood as a kind of quasi-religious leader, one who has set up his revival tent between a yoga studio and an urgent-care clinic, with the television cameras rolling.” (Scott Williams, Salt Lake City)Finally, here’s Charles Blow on his dinner with Sidney Poitier: “His enchantment settled on you, like a soft sweater. Cashmere, of course.” (Tom Wild, Killington, Vt., and Vipan Chandra, Attleboro, Mass.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.Bonus Regan Picture!Frank BruniDogs are Rorschachs, and someone less sentimental about them than I am might consider the positions of Regan (right) and Marlin (left, who belongs to my sister and is recovering from toe surgery) accidental. In this view, Marlin happened to place his cone, which he’s wearing so that he doesn’t lick and aggravate his wound, atop Regan’s paws; she was too zonked out to care. I choose a different interpretation. Marlin craved connection. Regan wanted to provide it, even if that meant coarse plastic against her soft fur. Mere inches from me on a conveniently king-size bed, these dog cousins (of a sort) comfort each other. I just look on — and beam.On a Personal NoteIt has been exactly six months since I left New York for North Carolina, and not one of them has gone by without several New Yorkers asking me how much I miss it. It’s an assumptive question: how much, not if. But I get it. In Manhattan I had more friends. In Manhattan I had more restaurants. In Manhattan I had more history, a memory on every street corner, and I had those early evenings when, without even planning it, I found myself walking along the Hudson exactly as the sun set over the Palisades. Don’t I pine just a bit for that?Oddly, no, and I somehow knew I wouldn’t. I could sense within me a growing impatience, a gnawing unsettledness, a twitchy finger wanting to turn the page. And the long list of reasons to ignore that feeling couldn’t compete with the emotional logic of paying it heed. In this life you can make lists of pros and cons and prudently yield to the arithmetic of it all. Or you can respond to the weather inside you, and just as wisely ride those currents.They carried me to Chapel Hill, where I smile almost every time I turn into my driveway because, for someone who’d become so firmly rooted in the concrete jungle, suburbia is the adventure. A garage door that opens automatically and a mailbox with a little red flag on its side are what’s exotic.Hardly a day goes by when Regan, in a patch of forest safely distant from streets and cars, doesn’t give futile chase to a posse of white-tailed deer, either sprinting toward them at a velocity that stuns me or hopping, like a kangaroo, so she doesn’t lose sight of her quarry in the tall grass. That’s my theater.A few of the neighborhood deer seem to have figured out what I already knew: Regan’s all bound, no bite. On those occasions when she catches up to them, she freezes. So they sometimes don’t bother to flee.In pursuing them, she’s just stretching her legs. By leaving Manhattan, I was doing something similar. There’s comfort and safety in staying put, but it can also leave you cramped, cinched. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to stray, why not head into the woods? More