After 44 days, Kendric Cromer, 12, left the hospital. While his family feels fortunate that he was the first to receive a treatment, their difficult experiences hint at what others will be up against.Kendric Cromer, 12, left Children’s National Hospital in a wheelchair on Wednesday, wearing a T-shirt and cap printed with designs from the anime series “Naruto” and a black face mask. Staff lined the hallway, cheering and waving noisemakers. He had just become the first patient to receive a gene therapy for sickle cell since it was approved — a therapy that is expected to free him from the ravages of the disease.After 44 days in the hospital, he was a bit dazed.“I thought I would have sickle cell for the rest of my life,” he said. The disease had deprived him of his childhood, making everyday activities, like playing basketball or riding a bike, impossible because they could bring on searing pain, often resulting in hospitalizations.But despite the celebratory atmosphere, Kendric and his parents are still shuddering over what they endured during his hospital stay.Nothing, absolutely nothing — not all the discussions with doctors, not all of their reading and highlighting of texts, not the 13-page consent form that included organ damage and even death as possible outcomes — prepared them for what he would go through.About 100,000 people in the United States have sickle cell disease. For the 20,000 or so with the most severe disease, gene therapy may be their only hope of living a normal life. The disease is caused by a mutation in hemoglobin genes that leads to crescent-shaped red blood cells, which tend to get stuck in blood vessels, causing episodes of excruciating pain. The blockages can damage organs, cause strokes and shorten lives.Until recently, most saw no way out.Then, last December, the Food and Drug Administration approved a $3.1 million sickle cell gene therapy by Bluebird Bio of Somerville, Mass., and a $2.2 million treatment by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston. That potentially gives patients like Kendric, if their insurance will pay for the therapy, a path to a life that is not shadowed by the ravages of the disease.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

Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | AmazonElisa Gutierrez and Stefani Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIowa was supposed to be fertile ground for Donald Trump’s primary challengers. Its population is disproportionately evangelical, and voters were expected to coalesce around a more faith-driven alternative. But that’s not what’s happened.This past summer, Trump was polling at around 42 percent in the state, a lead that has only continued to grow. Increasingly, it looks like Iowa is on track to coronate the former president.So when we visited the state fair in August, it was less to follow around a bunch of the candidates while they were milking a cow or flipping a pork chop, but rather to ask Iowa’s voters: What’s different this time?About ‘The Run-Up’“The Run-Up” is your guide to understanding the 2024 election. Through on-the-ground reporting and conversations with colleagues from The New York Times, newsmakers and voters across the country, our host, Astead W. Herndon, takes us beyond the horse race to explore how we got to this unprecedented moment in American politics. New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s conduct in abruptly deciding to end the case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn was so unusual that it raised a “plausible question” about the legitimacy of the move, a lawyer for the trial judge overseeing that case told a federal appeals court on Monday. In […] More

The producer has helped shape rap for the past decade, providing moody beats for Atlanta’s biggest stars and beyond. His latest LP, with Future, arrived last week.Since 2013, Metro Boomin has crafted the beats behind more than 75 songs that reached Billboard’s Hot 100, including 12 Top 10 hits. The Atlanta-via-St. Louis producer has turned contemporary radio into a shadowy world of nocturnal 808 drums and sinister synths while providing breakout moments for Atlanta rappers including Future, Migos and 21 Savage.Metro Boomin, now 30, emerged as a solo artist in 2017, but he has remained a vital collaborator. Two years later, he helped write “Heartless,” a No. 1 single for the Weeknd, and he oversaw the soundtrack for the 2023 sequel “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” This year, he was up for producer of the year, non-classical, at the Grammys (and lost to Jack Antonoff). Next week, he’s poised to claim his fourth No. 1 album with “We Don’t Trust You,” his 17-track collaboration with the woozy tunesmith Future. (A second project by the pair is due April 12.) Here are some of the crucial moments on his path to becoming hip-hop’s premier sculptor of sonic storm clouds.Listen on Apple Music and Spotify.Future featuring Lil Wayne, “Karate Chop (Remix)” (2013)Released in the run-up to Future’s highly anticipated second album, “Honest,” “Karate Chop” features a kaleidoscopic mix of sparkling arpeggios and buzzing synths. Metro Boomin was not sold on the beat, which he had crafted before his move to Atlanta, but Future became infatuated with it. The song became the first charting single to bear the producer’s credit, released while the 19-year-old Metro was a freshman at Morehouse College. “I had no clue from all the records we’ve done,” he told XXL, that this “would be the one. But these days, the people and the streets produce the singles.”ILoveMakonnen featuring Drake, “Tuesday” (2014)Produced with Sonny Digital and ILoveMakonnen, the breezy, peculiar “Tuesday” became Metro Boomin’s first Top 20 pop hit. Spacious, ethereal and recorded at Metro Boomin’s house, the track’s disorienting, calliope-style melody and barely there drums leave an open gulf for ILoveMakonnen’s singsong vocal to shine. “Every song with him is like one take,” Metro Boomin said of Makonnen in The Fader. “Even if he messes up at a little part, he’ll leave it, so it’s organic and raw. That’s why people love it. It’s breaking the rules.”From left, Future, Travis Scott, and Metro Boomin attending A Night With Future DS2 in 2015 in New York City.Johnny Nunez/WireImage, via Getty ImagesFuture featuring Drake, “Where Ya At” (2015)Future’s first three Top 40 hits — “Where Ya At,” the Drake collaboration “Jumpman,” and “Low Life” — all came courtesy of Metro Boomin. The first, an ice-cold trap pounder that sounds like the tortured strings of a prepared piano, provided a blueprint for the two-times-platinum “What a Time to Be Alive,” the full-length collaboration from Future and Drake, where Metro Boomin served as executive producer.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

Suraj Patel has few illusions about what he’s up against as he takes on two titans of New York politics, Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, in this summer’s blockbuster Democratic primary. But he does take hope from a theory about coffee shops.“There’s a Starbucks there and a Starbucks there, and then there’s some brand-new hipster coffee shop here,” the candidate said one recent weekday morning, whirling around 180 degrees in Velcro Stan Smith sneakers. “If all the people going to Starbucks split themselves half and half, then the third spot gets about 40 percent of the foot traffic.”“That,” he wagered a little optimistically, “is what we’re doing.”No doubt the Aug. 23 contest has been dominated by the bitter head-to-head confrontation between Ms. Maloney and Mr. Nadler, two septuagenarian fixtures of Manhattan’s political power structure who have been drawn into a single seat after serving three decades side by side in Washington.But in a summer when Democrats of all ages are reeling from stark losses on guns, abortion rights and the environment, Mr. Patel, 38, believes that discontent over the party’s aging leadership might just run deep enough for him to pull off a monumental upset.A frenetic Indian American lawyer who was just 9 when his opponents took office, Mr. Patel has adopted a less-than-meek approach. Campaigning recently in the heart of Mr. Nadler’s West Side stronghold, he sought to tie himself to Barack Obama and, when chatting up a retired apartment worker and union member, paraphrased the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic: “Fear is the mother of all sin.”“We’ve lost every major battle to Mitch McConnell and Republicans in the last decade, and the people who have been in office have no new answers,” Mr. Patel told him. “What we’re offering is a completely new set of arguments on inflation, on public safety, on economic growth and climate change.”The pitch landed. “I’m similar: proactive, go-getter, and you make sense,” replied the union man, Mario Sanders, keeping cool in an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. He walked off down 72nd Street with glossy Patel leaflets in one hand and his dog, Juicy, cradled in the other.Flipping enough votes to actually win, though, will be vastly more difficult, as Mr. Patel learned in two previous attempts to defeat Ms. Maloney, 76.He came closest in 2020, when he lost by less than four percentage points, winning diverse areas in Brooklyn and Queens that have since been removed from the district.Because the courts shuffled the district lines this spring, he only has weeks to try to reintroduce himself to New Yorkers who, in some cases, have enthusiastically supported his opponents since the 1970s, and to push younger voters to show up.Key Results in New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsOn June 28, New York held several primaries for statewide office, including for governor and lieutenant governor. Some State Assembly districts also had primaries.Kathy Hochul: With her win in the Democratic, the governor of New York took a crucial step toward winning a full term, fending off a pair of spirited challengers.Antonio Delgado: Ms. Hochul’s second in command and running mate also scored a convincing victory over his nearest Democratic challenger, Ana María Archila.Lee Zeldin: The congressman from Long Island won the Republican primary for governor, advancing to what it’s expected to be a grueling general election.N.Y. State Assembly: Long-tenured incumbents were largely successful in fending off a slate of left-leaning insurgents in the Democratic primary.With the party establishment shunning him, his most notable endorser is Andrew Yang, the former presidential and mayoral candidate who subsequently left the Democratic Party.Nor is Mr. Patel drawing the sort of sharp ideological contrasts that have propelled challengers to victory in recent cycles. He shares his opponents’ support for left-leaning policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, though many on the left view him skeptically. “I respect the hell out of it,” he said of Mr. Nadler’s voting record.“That’s a hard needle to thread,” said Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University. “Essentially, he’s saying, I will do the same thing they are doing, just minus 40 years’ experience.”Ms. Greer added that Mr. Patel had a heavy lift “to convince people he’s not just another young Obama upstart who thinks they are entitled to cut ahead of the queue.”Ms. Maloney and Mr. Nadler, flanking Gov. Kathy Hochul, were pushed into the same district after a court-ordered redistricting process.Anna Watts for The New York TimesMr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney appear torn between trying to ignore and to eviscerate Mr. Patel. They have dismissed his approach as ageist and warned that the city would suffer if it replaces two senior members with someone they charge has spent more time running for Congress than accomplishing anything of substance. “Most people do not go with that sort of ageism, most people look at people’s records,” Mr. Nadler, 75, said in May, not long after allies of both incumbents quietly tried to steer Mr. Patel to run in a neighboring district.Ms. Maloney recently told The West Side Rag that there was too much at stake for “on-the-job training” and accused Mr. Patel of “bigotry and lack of experience in dealing with critical issues I have dealt with my entire career.”In an interview over coffee (iced with Splenda, no milk) at an upscale cafe (Daily Provisions, neither Starbucks nor hipster), Mr. Patel insisted he was not worried about the institutional support lining up against him, nor his opponents’ critiques.He accused Ms. Maloney of using her perch in Congress to give oxygen to anti-vaccine activists (she says she supports vaccination) and knocked Mr. Nadler for taking corporate campaign funds.“Man, if you think people vote anymore on endorsements and other political leaders telling you who to vote for, then you’re missing the point,” he said.He showed up to greet voters in Chelsea on a Citi Bike, whipped out his iPhone to show off the average of seven miles a day he traverses on foot, and discussed his plans to start bar crawl canvassing, complete with coasters with his face on it. (He drew blowback for using the dating app Tinder to contact potential supporters in 2018.)His policy proposals skew technocratic, built around what Mr. Patel calls “the Abundant Society,” a plan for federal investments in education, child care, manufacturing and research.Mr. Patel came within four percentage points of upsetting Ms. Maloney in the 2020 primary.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThe son of Indian immigrants, he lived above the family bodega in Bloomfield, N.J., where 13 people crammed in a one-bedroom apartment. The family moved to Indiana when he was 6 and bought its first motel.Mr. Patel tends to say less about how the business grew into a multimillion-dollar development and hotel management operation that made the family rich, spawned labor complaints and helped him finance a pricey East Village apartment and, until recently, a house in the Hamptons.In a city where politicians often rise through local office or activism, Mr. Patel dabbled in different lines of work: He helped the family business, including during the coronavirus pandemic; staffed Mr. Obama’s campaigns and White House travel; and taught business classes at N.Y.U.Mr. Patel would be the first Indian American from New York in Congress, and his campaign has drawn support from South Asians across the country. Indian American Impact, a national group, said it would run a WhatsApp messaging program to try to drive up turnout among the district’s small slice of South Asians. (Another Indian American, Ashmi Sheth, is also running.)“Democrats can’t just repackage the status quo and sell it back to voters as different when, in reality, people are looking for a clean break,” said Neil Makhija, the group’s leader.Across the district, though, responses to Mr. Patel’s overtures were more mixed.“Soon, when Nadler retires, then I’ll vote for you,” Roz Paaswell, 83, told him as he approached with a flier on the Upper West Side. “You’ve going to have a place in the city and in politics, but not in this seat.”Later, Ms. Paaswell heaped praise on Mr. Nadler and said she had never missed a vote. “He has seniority. He has clout. I love him,” she said.Vanessa Chen, 35, was equally blunt as she walked laps during her lunch break a few days later around Stuyvesant Town, one of the largest voting blocs in the district, just a stone’s throw from Mr. Patel’s apartment.“We just need new blood,” said Ms. Chen, a software engineer. “The Boomers are going. They don’t know how the new world works.”But does she plan to vote in August?“Probably,” she laughed, adding that she had not been aware of the primary date until a reporter informed her.Susan C. Beachy More