Thousands of Boeing workers in Washington State and Oregon walked off the job on Friday in the first strike at the plane maker in 16 years.Boeing is facing a strike that threatens to disrupt plane production, after workers overwhelmingly voted to reject a tentative contract their unions had reached with the company.Thousands of workers walked off the job in the Seattle and Portland, Ore., regions on Friday, a move that is likely to stall operations at factories where Boeing manufactures most of its commercial planes. While the deal their unions struck with the company on Sunday included double digit pay raises and improvements to benefits, 95 percent of workers rejected the proposed contract, opting instead to leverage a strike to push for more.Here’s what else to know about the company’s first strike since 2008:How many workers are on strike?Boeing, one of the largest exporters in the United States, employs a total of nearly 150,000 people across the country — almost half of them in Washington State — and more than 170,000 people worldwide. The contract that spurred Friday’s strike covers about a fifth of the company’s employees.A vast majority of the 33,000 workers under the contract are represented by District 751 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Boeing’s largest union. Most of that union’s members work on commercial airplanes in the Seattle area. Workers in the Portland, Ore., area, who are represented by the union’s smaller District W24, are also on strike.What prompted them to walk off the job?The leaders of the unions representing the workers on strike reached a tentative deal with Boeing on Sunday that would have secured raises of 25 percent over four years, along with improvements to health care and retirement benefits. The company also committed to building its next commercial plane in the Pacific Northwest.But workers’ overwhelming rejection of that tentative contract reflects their willingness to fight for more, in large part to make up for concessions made in past talks, including the loss of pension benefits a decade ago. The unions started the talks by asking for raises of 40 percent.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 Jewish Museum pairs the Texas artist with a 20th-century master. Together they confront racism with horror — and humor.When Trenton Doyle Hancock discovered the artist Philip Guston, it was a revelation. Hancock had just transferred from junior college in his hometown, Paris, Texas, to nearby East Texas State University. He was taking a printmaking class and working with a haunting photograph he’d made of himself partially cloaked in a white sheet with a noose around his neck. The rope wound around his body, including his semi-bare right arm, which holds up a hammer. Titled “The Properties of the Hammer” (1993), it probed the dark contradictions of being a Black man in America.Hancock’s printmaking teacher, Thomas Seawell, asked if he knew about Philip Guston, the New York School artist. Guston had (very controversially) left behind Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s to make figurative, cartoonish paintings of objects like books and shoes, which hearkened back to the Holocaust, as well as hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. Seawell saw a kinship between Guston’s work and Hancock’s, but Hancock had never heard of Guston. So Seawell lent him a book, and the student fell in love.“The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible,” Hancock, 50, recalled recently. “When you put a colorful toy in front of a child, they want to eat it. That’s how I felt about those paintings: I just wanted to eat them. I didn’t even know you could make work that looked like this. It was totally new to me.”In “The Studio” (1969), Philip Guston’s hooded protagonist is an artist painting his own effigy. The artist was exploring “what would it be like to be evil?” Trenton Doyle Hancock recalled: “The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible.” The Estate of Philip Guston; via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkIf you’ve never had the urge to eat a painting, you’re not alone, but meeting Hancock or seeing his art helps make that impulse understandable. He is a voracious consumer of culture, and his work has an intense physicality — in the bodies that are forever bending, stretching and breaking in his images, and in the cutout and collaged surfaces of his paintings. Hancock’s world is a profusion of colors, of media, of characters in his ever-expanding multiverse.His studio in a Houston suburb bears this out. Rooms of the two-story house are devoted to various collections, including sketchbooks dating back to childhood, scraps and detritus (literally dirt swept off the floor of past studios), and plastic bottle caps sorted by color.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

Justice John Paul Stevens’s files on thousands of cases, including landmark decisions on abortion and the 2000 election, have been made public, opening a window on the Supreme Court.WASHINGTON — In June 1992, less than two weeks before the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy sent a colleague some “late-night musings.”“Roe was, at the least, a very close case,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the three-page memorandum, which included reflections on the power of precedent, the court’s legitimacy and the best way to address a cutting dissent.The document is part of an enormous trove of the private papers of Justice John Paul Stevens released on Tuesday by the Library of Congress. They provide a panoramic inside look at the justices at work on thousands of cases, including Bush v. Gore and the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.The papers are studded with candid and occasionally caustic remarks, sometimes echoing current concerns about the court’s power and authority.In the Casey decision, Justice Kennedy joined a controlling opinion with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David H. Souter that saved the core of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe in 1973.In June, the current Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey after considering questions about precedent and the court’s legitimacy, coming to the opposite conclusion from Justice Kennedy.There are other echoes of recent events in the papers of Justice Stevens, who served on the court for 35 years, retired in 2010 and died in 2019, at 99.There was, for instance, an apparent leak, one that prompted Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to write a stern note to all of the law clerks on June 10, 1992. The current issue of Newsweek, the chief justice wrote, “contains a purported account of what is happening inside the court in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.”The article, attributing its information to “sources” and “clerks,” said that “at least three of the nine justices are planning to draft opinions in Casey” and predicted, correctly, that the decision would be released on June 29.Chief Justice Rehnquist admonished the clerks to follow a rule in the court’s code of conduct, which said, “There should be as little communication as possible between the clerk and representatives of the press.” He added, underlining the last three words: “In the case of any matter pending before the court, the least possible communication is none at all.”Researchers will be studying the Stevens papers for decades, and only small glimpses were possible in a day’s scrutiny of a selection of them. But those glimpses made clear that the current turmoil at the court has historical analogues.In 2000, for instance, when the court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore by a 5-to-4 vote, members of the majority wrote scathing private memos protesting what they called unduly harsh language in the dissents.Justice Stevens’s dissent ended this way: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”In a memo to his colleagues on Dec. 12, 2000, the day the decision was issued, Justice Kennedy, who had voted with the majority, appeared wounded.“The tone of the dissents is disturbing both on an institutional and personal level,” he wrote. “I have agonized over this and made my best judgment.”He added, “The dissents, permit me to say, in effect try to coerce the majority by trashing the court themselves, thereby making their dire, and I think unjustified, predictions a self-fulfilling prophecy.”Justice Antonin Scalia, who had also voted with the majority, said he was “the last person to complain that dissents should not be thorough and hard hitting.”But he said he could not “help but observe that those of my colleagues who were protesting so vigorously that the court’s judgment today will do irreparable harm have spared no pains — in a veritable blizzard of separate dissents — to assist that result.”At an earlier stage of the case, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who dissented in Bush v. Gore, urged his colleagues to stay away from the dispute, recalling the role that Supreme Court justices had played on a commission created to resolve the contested presidential election of 1876.“Rather than the court lending the process legitimacy, the process damaged the legitimacy of the court,” Justice Breyer wrote. “I doubt very much that our intervention would assure anyone that the process had worked more fairly. Rather, I fear that history could repeat itself, were we to intervene now.”In statements after the Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has said that attacks on the court’s legitimacy, as opposed to its reasoning, should be out of bounds.In the 1992 memo containing his “late-night musings,” which was addressed to Justice Souter and copied to Justices O’Connor and Stevens, Justice Kennedy also reflected on the court’s legitimacy in the context of abortion.He appeared troubled by aspects of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s dissent, which said public opinion should not affect the court’s work.“You can fend off the chief,” Justice Kennedy told Justice Souter, “by stating that we are not concerned with preserving our legitimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the Constitution. Thus, when we speak of the principled character of our decisions, we mean that they are informed by precedent, logic and the traditions of our people, all with reference to our constitutional heritage.”“We must be clear,” he went on, “that we are not guided by expediency, contemporary attitudes or our own morality.”The newly released files cover the years up to 2005, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court. They are filled with notes in Justice Stevens’s not always legible scrawl, marked-up briefs, draft opinions, vote tallies, memos among the justices, recommendations from clerks and all manner of other paperwork.Before the new release, the most recent set of Supreme Court papers was from the files of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who served through 1994 and died in 1999.The only current member of the court featured in the new files is Justice Clarence Thomas. The remaining parts of Justice Stevens’s papers are scheduled to be released in 2030.Kitty Bennett More

Mr. Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, has stood out not just for his politics but also his style. Now, he has opened his closet to raise money for charity.In January 1996, the newly sworn-in mayor of San Francisco noticed something wrong at City Hall. One of his aides was wearing a linen suit in the winter. The mayor, shocked, sent him home to change immediately.The moral of the story: Abide by the fashion calendar. And style matters a great deal to Willie Brown.Mr. Brown, who served as mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004, is one of the sharpest dressed political figures in California.The handkerchief peeks out of his Baldini suit pocket at just the right angle, and is just the right color. And he once raced a Municipal Railway streetcar on Market Street to disprove an article that said pedestrians were faster than the train service — all while wearing a suit, wingtips and a wide-brimmed Panama hat.At the age of 91, Mr. Brown has opened his closet. His green Gucci high-top sneakers? Yours for $105.50. His ivory Kiton cashmere crew-neck sweater? $36. About 50 items Mr. Brown used to wear — shoes, track suits, T-shirts, sweaters, jackets — are being sold at an online auction sponsored by Goodwill, the nonprofit retailer. Once a year, Mr. Brown would get rid of a few old items in his closet and donate them anonymously to Goodwill thrift stores. Goodwill San Francisco Bay decided to create the Willie Brown Collection on eBay and auction his clothes and shoes to the highest bidders. 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

This article is part of Frank Bruni’s free newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.As the start of his prison sentence approached, Roger Stone didn’t despair.“I had prayed fervently,” the felon told Mike Allen of Axios in a phone interview a few days ago, adding that he believed that “the whole matter was in God’s hands” and that “God would provide.”“And he did,” Stone said.No, Mr. Stone. President Trump provided. That’s who commuted your sentence and set you free, which you have no business being. And this conflation of human corruption and divine intervention, of “The Apprentice” and the Almighty, has gone too far and has to stop. It’s an insult to true faith. It’s cheap.I’m not going to detail the ways in which godliness and Trumpiness are at violent odds with each other. I’m not going to delineate the president’s digressions from the Commandments. That’s an exercise in the blindingly obvious.Nor do I care to revisit the question of why so many evangelicals and other conservative Christians support Trump, because it has been amply visited and there’s no mystery there. Trump has aligned certain positions of his — principally, opposition to legal abortion — with theirs. They’ll accept his profanity in return for his judges. It’s a calculation, pure and simple: a compromise. Politics is lousy with them.But I do want to flag the propensity for God talk among Trump’s unscrupulous minions. I want to object to their use of God as a cover, their nod to God to justify their service to a president who no doubt thinks that the Golden Rule refers to the requisite measure of gilding for a skyscraper or casino.They have turned God into a prop, a tic, and while they’re welcome to their rationalizations, they’re not entitled to their righteousness. I’m not offended on behalf of God. I’m offended on behalf of decency.Kayleigh McEnany, the relatively new White House press secretary, wears a silver cross around her neck. As a recent profile of her in The Atlantic by Emma Green pointed out, she publicly faith-shamed reporters who challenged Trump’s blasé attitude toward the pandemic as a group that “desperately wants to see these churches and houses of worship stay closed.”And in a recent interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, McEnany said: “I stand as a Christian woman, someone who believes in equality and truth and loyalty and honesty.” She also, by all appearances, believes in Trump, which doesn’t quite square with those other principles. But it does give her a pedestal.“Only God could deliver such a savior to our nation and only God could allow me to help,” Brad Parscale, who is managing Trump’s re-election campaign, tweeted last year. Hmm. I don’t know about that. Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg played their parts.Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who once had McEnany’s job, suggested that Trump was chosen for his current task by God. So did Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state.I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Bill Barr, the attorney general, more or less shares that view. The tenor of a big speech he gave last year at the University of Notre Dame made clear that he sees himself as a soldier in a holy war between the Judeo-Christian tradition and godless secularists. He must see Trump as the general, given how obsequiously he marches behind him.I have enormous respect for people of faith, or at least for many of them, because their conviction can be a wellspring of empathy, generosity, grace. But those traits also flourish in many people who don’t belong to any organized religion or, for that matter, don’t believe in God. And invoking God — as so many of Trump’s enablers do — is no predictor of rectitude or real devotion. Sometimes it’s just a reflex. Other times it’s a ruse.I myself am not conventionally religious. I’m not versed in theology, either. So I cannot claim to understand God’s design any better than the Trump aides who drone on about it do. I’m no more tapped into God than Roger Stone is.But I’m nonetheless confident that no God would smile on Trump’s stewardship of this pandemic, during which so many lives are being needlessly lost. No God would bless Trump’s march across Lafayette Square, which was cleared with force and tear gas, so that he could brandish a Bible for photographers, turning a sacred text into a partisan bauble.No God would fail to notice the void of penitence in a president with so much to atone for. And no God would put Stone, a dirty-trickster who has never demonstrated any discernible interest in cleansing himself, at the top of his to-do list, liberating him so that he could rejoin the ranks of Republicans intent on securing Trump another four years.Good luck to them. Polls, death tolls and the president’s increasingly unhinged behavior suggest that they haven’t a prayer.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and me. More