Aurelia Butler

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    How Siblings Shape Us

    While parents work hard to mold their offspring, those offspring just as often mold each other. Happy Mother’s Day. The cover story in today’s Times Magazine begins with an idea: While parents work hard to mold their offspring, those offspring just as often mold each other. Susan Dominus, who has written many moving pieces about children and families, looks at a growing field of research to see how kids’ personalities “spill over” onto their siblings. It’s not always the way you’d think.As the father of three boys (and as a sibling myself), I was rapt. You should read the story. In today’s newsletter, I ask Susan a few questions about her findings.What got you interested in this story?My older brother was extremely influential in my own life. When I was 14, and he was home on a break from college, he talked me into starting a school newspaper. He somehow knew before I did (and definitely before my parents did) what kind of work I would love doing. When I started interviewing people about the way their families influenced their lives, I was struck by how often siblings played a pivotal role in their careers — in making an introduction, giving a key piece of advice, setting the bar high.You tell the story of several high-achieving families. But the phenomenon isn’t necessarily strongest among the privileged, is it?Not at all. If anything, research suggests that what’s known as the “sibling spillover effect” (a measure of how much siblings influence each other, especially academically) is more powerful in disadvantaged families. In those families, the bond can be more influential — the siblings spend a lot of time together, either because their parents are so busy working, or because the family doesn’t have the resources to spend on tons of extracurriculars.My kids have wildly different personalities. Tell me what the research shows about birth-order psychology — the idea that your place among siblings shapes you?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

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    Tufts Student Returns to Massachusetts After 6 Weeks in Immigration Detention

    Freed after her painful ordeal in a federal facility, Rumeysa Ozturk expressed joy, gratitude and continued faith in American democracy.Rumeysa Ozturk returned to Massachusetts on Saturday evening, eyes welling with joy and gratitude at the end of her six-week odyssey in federal custody, a case that stirred outrage over President Trump’s immigration crackdown.A flight carrying Ms. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen studying at Tufts University on a student visa, touched down at Boston Logan International Airport one day after a federal judge in Vermont ordered that she be immediately released from a detention facility in Louisiana.Speaking in a room at the airport, she flashed smiles and looked happy and relaxed, but also became visibly emotional at times. Ms. Ozturk thanked supporters for their kindness and expressed love for the country that imprisoned her and is still trying to deport her.“America is the greatest democracy in the world,” she said, adding, “I have faith in the American system of justice.”Ms. Ozturk, a fifth-year doctoral student, was among more than a thousand international students whose visas were canceled by the federal government and who have faced deportation. The moves came as the Trump administration escalated its attack on higher education, saying its goal was to root out antisemitism.Ms. Ozturk had written an opinion piece in the student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to pro-Palestinian demands. Her supporters denied that she was antisemitic, and said that she was detained in retaliation for her speech in violation of the First Amendment.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

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    Reluctant at First, Trump Officials Intervened in South Asia as Nuclear Fears Grew

    After Vice President JD Vance suggested that the conflict between India and Pakistan was not America’s problem, the Trump administration grew concerned that it could spiral out of control.As a conflict between India and Pakistan escalated, Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on Thursday that it was “fundamentally none of our business.” The United States could counsel both sides to back away, he suggested, but this was not America’s fight.Yet within 24 hours, Mr. Vance and Marco Rubio, in his first week in the dual role of national security adviser and secretary of state, found themselves plunged into the details. The reason was the same one that prompted Bill Clinton in 1999 to deal with another major conflict between the two longtime enemies: fear that it might quickly go nuclear.What drove Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio into action was evidence that the Pakistani and Indian Air Forces had begun to engage in serious dogfights, and that Pakistan had sent 300 to 400 drones into Indian territory to probe its air defenses. But the most significant causes for concern came late Friday, when explosions hit the Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the garrison city adjacent to Islamabad.The base is a key installation, one of the central transport hubs for Pakistan’s military and the home to the air refueling capability that would keep Pakistani fighters aloft. But it is also just a short distance from the headquarters of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which oversees and protects the country’s nuclear arsenal, now believed to include about 170 or more warheads. The warheads themselves are presumed to be spread around the country.The intense fighting broke out between India and Pakistan after 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists, were killed in a terrorist attack on April 22 in Kashmir, a border region claimed by both nations. On Saturday morning, President Trump announced that the two countries had agreed to a cease-fire.One former American official long familiar with Pakistan’s nuclear program noted on Saturday that Pakistan’s deepest fear is of its nuclear command authority being decapitated. The missile strike on Nur Khan could have been interpreted, the former official said, as a warning that India could do just that.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

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    Koyo Kouoh, Prominent Art World Figure, Is Dead at 57

    She had recently been named to oversee next year’s Venice Biennale. She died just days before she was scheduled to announce its theme and title.Koyo Kouoh in 2023. As the curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, one of Africa’s largest contemporary art museums, she had built a global reputation as a torchbearer for artists of color.Tsele Nthane for The New York TimesKoyo Kouoh, one of the global art world’s most prominent figures, who had been slated to become the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale, died on Saturday in Switzerland. She was 57.Her death was confirmed by the biennale’s organizers. The announcement did not cite a cause or say where in Switzerland she had died.The biennale said that Ms. Kouoh’s “sudden and untimely” death came just days before she was scheduled to announce the title and theme of next year’s event. The statement added that her death “leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art.”The Venice Biennale is arguably the art world’s most important event. Staged every two years since 1895, it always includes a large-scale group show, organized by the curator, alongside dozens of national pavilions, organized independently.A spokeswoman for the biennale did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what Ms. Kouoh’s death would mean for next year’s exhibition, which is scheduled to run from May 9 through Nov. 22.As the curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, one of Africa’s largest contemporary art museums, Ms. Kouoh built a global reputation as a torchbearer for artists of color from Africa and elsewhere, although her interests were global in reach. “I’m an international curator,” she said last December in an interview with the The New York Times.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

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    Margot Friedländer, Holocaust Survivor Who Found Her Voice, Dies at 103

    She never spoke of her experience until after her husband’s death, when she returned to Berlin with a mission to tell her story, and to teach tolerance.Margot Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor who spent more than 60 years in exile (as she saw it) in New York City before returning to Germany in 2010 and finding her voice as a champion of Holocaust remembrance — work that made her a celebrity to young Germans and landed her on the cover of German Vogue last year — died on Friday in Berlin. She was 103.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation, an organization promoting tolerance and democracy.“It helps me to talk about what happened,” she told the members of a UNICEF Club in 2023. “You young people help me because you listen. I don’t bottle it up anymore. I share my story for all of you.”Ms. Friedländer and her husband, Adolf — known in America as Eddie, for obvious reasons — arrived in New York in the summer of 1946. They settled into a small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. He found work as comptroller of the 92nd Street Y, the cultural center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and she became a travel agent.The couple had married at the camp where they were both interned; once in America, they never spoke of their shared experience. Mr. Friedländer was adamant about never returning to the country that had murdered their families. But when he died in 1997, Ms. Friedländer began to wonder what had been left behind.She had found a community at the Y, and, at the urging of Jo Frances Brown, who was then the program director there, she signed up for a memoir-writing class. It was weeks before she participated, however. The other students, all American-born, were writing about their families, their children, their pets. One night, unable to sleep, she began to write, and the first stories she told were her earliest childhood memories.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

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    How Front Pages Around the World Covered the Selection of Pope Leo XIV

    In a digital age, the front pages of print newspapers can still capture a historic moment as they did on Friday with word-playing headlines, splashy photos and a dose of solemnity.Newspapers around the world on Friday covered the election of a new pope, Robert Francis Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV, with big photos, plays on words and nods to his nationalities.Pope Leo XIV, who was born in Chicago, made history as the first North American pope, and plenty of tabloids and broadsheets played up his background as an American.Many newspapers used the Latin phrase “Habemus papam,” which means “We have a pope.” For English newspapers, it was a rare appearance of a foreign phrase in a headline.Chicago TribuneDaily RecordCardinal Dominique Mamberti of France used that phrase, prompting cheers, after he emerged on the papal balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to introduce the new pope.Overwhelmingly, newspapers ran with images of Leo XIV as he greeted the world as pope for the first time, waving to crowds from the papal balcony.L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, which is in Italian, had a full-page spread with a Latin headline that translated to: “We have a Pope. Robert Francis Prevost who gave himself the name Leo XIV.”Many foreign outlets highlighted Pope Leo XIV’s American roots.The Irish Daily Mirror led with “Let U.S. Pray” and Le Temps, a Swiss French-language newspaper, went with “HabemUS Papam.”The Sun, a British tabloid, declared “God Bless American.”Irish Daily MirrorThe SunNewspapers in Chicago highlighted the pope, who grew up in Dolton, Ill., a Chicago suburb, as a hometown hero.The Chicago Tribune claimed Pope Leo XIV for the city, writing “Chicago’s pope.”The front page of The Chicago Sun-Times read “DA POPE!” in a cheeky allusion to the Chicago Bears, the football team nicknamed by fans as “Da Bears.”The front page of The Chicago Sun-Times on Friday.Nam Y. Huh/Associated PressThe Philadelphia Inquirer, which carried the headline “An American Pope,” was quick to note in a subhead that Pope Leo XIV is an alumnus of Villanova University, the Catholic school based in a Philadelphia suburb.While Corriere della Sera of Milan said “Il Papa americano,” Peru’s Correo proclaimed “UN PAPA PERUANO.”Though Pope Leo XIV is not of Peruvian birth, some in the country have claimed him as one of their own. He lived in Peru as a missionary for many years, before serving as the bishop of the Diocese of Chiclayo, a city in northern Peru, from 2015 to 2023.The Record, El Mercurio, Blick, World JournalA display of front pages from Peruvian newspapers celebrating the new pope at a newsstand in Chiclayo, Peru.Marco Garro for The New York TimesEl Mercurio, a Chilean newspaper, compromised in its headline, calling Pope Leo XIV both Peruvian and American. (He is a dual citizen.)Some newspapers decided to lead with the pope’s papal name instead of his background or nationality.Plenty of outlets, from Diário de Notícias in Portugal and Libération in France, had headlines that said “Leo.” These outlets chose to publish a more pious posture, picturing Pope Leo XIV with his hands clasped in prayer.Others quoted Pope Leo XIV’s first message as the leader of the Catholic Church: “‘Peace be with you,’” read The San Francisco Chronicle headline.Diário de Notícias LibérationNewspapers featuring the new pope on the front page at a vendor in downtown Nairobi, Kenya.Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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    3 Lawmakers Involved in Newark ICE Protest Could Be Arrested, DHS Says

    The legislators were with Mayor Ras Baraka when he was arrested Friday outside an immigration detention facility. A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said they could face assault charges.A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security suggested on Saturday that three Democratic members of Congress might face assault charges after a confrontation outside an immigration detention facility in Newark during the arrest of the city’s mayor, even as new details emerged that appeared to contradict the Trump administration’s account of the surrounding events.The three lawmakers — Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver of New Jersey — were inside the facility on Friday for what they described as a congressional oversight visit, which they have the right to conduct under federal law. The facility, Delaney Hall, received its first detainees last week and is eventually expected to hold as many as 1,000 migrants at a time.Soon after the legislators left the building on Friday afternoon, Newark’s mayor, Ras J. Baraka, was arrested by the head of Homeland Security Investigations in a brief but volatile clash that involved a team of masked federal agents wearing military fatigues and the three lawmakers. He was then taken to a separate federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the city and released five hours later.Precisely what led to Mr. Baraka’s arrest on federal trespassing charges, in a public area outside a facility that is owned by a private prison company, remains unclear. But much of what unfolded was recorded by journalists, as well as by cameras worn by law enforcement officials and videos taken by activists protesting nearby.Mayor Ras J. Baraka had pushed back against the Trump administration’s characterization of the events surrounding his arrest. “This is all fabrication,” he told reporters Saturday.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesTricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, told CNN on Saturday that a body camera video showed “members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer.”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

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    William L. Porter, Designer of Classic American Cars, Dies at 93

    As a senior designer at G.M., he helped create the exuberant, elongated shape of 1960s and ’70s cars like the Pontiac GTO, the Bonneville and the Trans Am.William L. Porter, a car designer who helped create the shapes of some of the most celebrated American vehicles of the late 1960s and early ’70s, died on April 25 at his home in Whitmore Lake, Mich. He was 93.His death was confirmed by his son, Adam, who did not specify a cause.As a senior designer at General Motors for more than three decades, Mr. Porter was intimately involved in determining the appearance of numerous cars that were uniquely American in their exuberant, elongated design and curvaceous forms. These were big, sleek cars for long, empty American roads, and for cities filled with the parking lots that could accommodate them, light years from the compact boxes made for Europe’s narrow streets.Mr. Porter made this sketch of the Pontiac GTO body in 1962, when he was just beginning to conceive of the car that would become the 1968 GTO.via Porter familyA 1969 iteration of the Pontiac GTO design.iStock Editorial/Getty Images PlusThe Pontiac GTO model produced in 1968 and 1969, with its endless hood and smooth, tapering back — its “monocoque shell form with elliptical pressure bulges over the wheels,” as Mr. Porter put it in an interview in 2000 — was one of his signature creations.G.M. made him chief designer at what it called the Pontiac 1 Studio in 1968, and he held that position until 1972, before going on to other senior design positions. In the early 1970s, he directed the design of the company’s LeMans, Catalina and Bonneville cars, which had tapering forms with jutting trunks, in keeping with his aesthetic.“I was taken with a plainer, curvaceous look featuring long, muscular shapes based on elliptical vocabulary,” Mr. Porter, a connoisseur and collector of American design, including Tiffany glass and Arts and Crafts furniture, said in an interview with Hot Rod magazine in 2007.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