Aurelia Butler

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    The House Next Door Has Black Mold. Do I Tell Potential Tenants?

    The issue was serious enough to cause health issues for the previous residents.My wife and I live in a neighborhood of single-family homes, most of which are owner-occupied. The home next door, however, is rented out by an absentee landlord. We became friendly with the previous tenants, who moved out very abruptly a couple of weeks ago. We learned from them that the house is infested with black mold, as identified by a professional testing company, and they shared the results with us. The mold issue was serious enough to cause health issues for the previous tenants. To our knowledge, the landlord has done nothing to mitigate this issue, and now he has listed the house for rent again. Our concern is that we’ve seen families with small children looking at the house. We believe that we might be in legal jeopardy if we were to inform prospective tenants about the mold issue, but what is our moral obligation? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:In the late 1990s, Stachybotrys chartarum — sometimes dubbed “toxic black mold” — became the subject of national alarm, with news stories linking it to devastating health effects. Much of that panic was later walked back after scientific review. Still, people with allergies can experience a stuffy or runny nose and the like from mold exposure, while for people with asthma, compromised immune systems or simply bad luck, mold exposure can be genuinely harmful. In children, mold exposure has been associated with an increased risk of developing asthma. In every state, a landlord implicitly promises that a rental property is habitable. What counts as “habitable” varies by jurisdiction, but a serious mold problem most likely violates that standard.If the previous tenants shared their testing results with you, try to get a copy, if you haven’t already. You’ll want to satisfy to yourself, too, that the company doing the mold inspection is on the up-and-up; notoriously, there can be a conflict of interest when the people doing the inspections are also in the remediation business. (“In most cases, if visible mold growth is present, sampling is unnecessary,” the E.P.A. advises, while the C.D.C. flatly says that it “does not recommend mold testing,” noting that “there are no set standards for what is and what is not an acceptable quantity of different kinds of mold in a home.”) Assuming the problem has been correctly identified, you might write the landlord, asking whether the issue has been addressed, and sharing your health concerns.If you’re convinced that the danger remains, you could share the documentation with the agent listing this rental property. Realtors have their own ethical and legal obligations: If they believe the home is uninhabitable, they can’t simply let tenants assume the risk. And they’re unlikely to want to expose themselves to legal jeopardy for concealing a defect. (Disclosing facts shouldn’t expose you to legal jeopardy, but that’s a question for a lawyer.)You’re not under a moral obligation to act, and you wouldn’t be wrong to stay out of it. But this is the kind of gesture that, when well-informed, can make the world a little better. If a child were to suffer because no one spoke up, you might wish you had said something. If you were the one about to move in, you would want to know. A decent society depends, in part, on people who choose to help when they don’t strictly have to.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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    When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere

    About 70,000 years ago in Africa, humans expanded into more extreme environments, a new study finds, setting the stage for our global migration.Geography is one of the things that sets apart modern humans.Our closest living relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — are confined to a belt of Central African forests. But humans have spread across every continent, even remote islands. Our species can thrive not only in forests, but in grasslands, swamps, deserts and just about every other ecosystem dry land has to offer.In a study published on Wednesday, scientists pinpoint the origin of our extraordinary adaptability: Africa, about 70,000 years ago.That’s when modern humans learned to thrive in more extreme habitats. We’ve been expanding our range ever since. The finding could help resolve a paradox that has puzzled researchers for years.Our species arose in Africa about a million years ago and then departed the continent a number of times over the past few hundred thousand years. But those migrants eventually disappeared, with no descendants.Finally, about 50,000 years ago, one last wave spread out of Africa. All non-Africans can trace their ancestry to this last migration. The new study might explain why the final expansion was so successful.In the new study, Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues sought to understand what sort of habitats early humans lived in across Africa.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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    Scientific Study Shows Bogong Moths Use Sky For Migration

    A new study suggests that these Australian insects may be the first invertebrates to use the night sky as a compass during migration.In the summer, the walls of the caves in the Australian Alps are tiled with Bogong moths.Months before, billions of these small, nocturnal insects migrate about 600 miles to this destination — a place they have never visited before. Seeking refuge from the summer heat, they travel across southeast Australia to these cool alpine caves. Then, in the fall, they migrate back to their breeding grounds, where they eventually die.This remarkable journey has long puzzled scientists like Eric Warrant, a neurobiologist at Lund University in Sweden. “How on earth do these moths know where to go?” he said.Now, a study in the journal Nature by Dr. Warrant and his colleagues reveals the details of the insect’s impressive feat, showing that the Bogong moth may be the first invertebrate to use the starry night sky for migration. The findings suggest the insects use a set of internal compasses, one guided by the Earth’s magnetic field and the other by the night sky, to reach their destination.“That an insect brain that is smaller than a grain of rice is able to do this is just remarkable,” said Basil el Jundi, a neuroscientist at the University of Oldenburg in Germany who was not involved in the study.The Australian Bogong moth could fit in the palm of your hand. It has a two-inch-long wingspan, a small set of eyes and a brain that is roughly a tenth of the volume of a grain of rice. Despite their small size, they have played a big role in Australia. Once an important source of food for Indigenous Australians, the insect also holds a strong cultural value because of its impressive migration.Few insects undertake long-distance migration from dispersed breeding grounds to meet in a single, specific destination. The most famous example is the monarch butterfly, which relies on the sun as a visual compass. Like monarchs, Bogong moths use the Earth’s magnetic field for their long journey. They combine the magnetic compass with visual cues or markers, though researchers did not know what these were.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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    5 Highlights From the Pianist Alfred Brendel’s Sprawling Career

    Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, concentrated on a small number of canonical composers, mainly Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.The classical music industry valorizes sweeping range, favoring artists whose programs cross centuries. But the magisterial pianist Alfred Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, was of the old school, focusing his long career on a small number of canonical composers from the same era: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.He nurtured their works with almost spiritual diligence, performing and reperforming, recording and rerecording. Scholarly and eccentric, acute in essays as well as in concert, Brendel rose from obscurity in Austria to become a best-selling, hall-filling star. His extended period under the radar perhaps contributed to his confidence in his idiosyncrasies: both his rumpled onstage manner and his fearless deployment of a sound that could be cool, even hard.That sound was part of Brendel’s resolutely lucid approach to music. Avoiding the impression of milking scores for excess emotion, he gained a reputation for intellectual, analytical performances. Some found his playing a little dry, but others heard a kind of transcendently austere authority.Here are a few highlights from his enormous discography.HaydnBrendel championed Haydn’s and Schubert’s sonatas at a time when not everyone placed those pieces at the center of the pantheon. You can hear some of his flintiness of tone in the Presto from Haydn’s Sonata in E minor, the feeling that he’s poking at the notes. But the livelier passages alternate with slightly, alluringly softened ones, for an effect of unexpected complexity in fairly straightforward music. His fast playing never seems dashed off; he is always palpably thinking. And his diamond-sharp pointedness in the opening of the sonata’s Adagio second movement eventually travels toward mysterious tenderness.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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    A Teenage Soldier’s Wartime Scrapbook Inspired His Granddaughter’s First Novel

    Heather Clark’s debut novel, “The Scrapbook,” considers young love as buffeted by historical ruptures.To write historical fiction is to know that the past finds many places to hide. For Heather Clark it was in her grandfather’s scrapbook, stowed away in an attic until after he died.With a burgundy cover now so faded the gold tooling on the front barely stands out, it speaks to the experiences of a fresh-faced, perpetually grinning 19-year-old Irish American G.I. deployed to Europe in the last stretch of World War II, his trusty camera almost always slung around his neck. He returned ravaged by encounters in a war he refused to speak about for the rest of his long life.Along with birthday cards and holiday telegrams, Army rosters and food ration certificates, Nazi uniform badges and Gen. Omar Bradley’s sternly worded “Special Orders for German American Relations,” the album includes Herbert J. Clark’s photographs of the place that had drained the smile from his face: Dachau.His granddaughter is an award-winning literary historian and critic, whose “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” (2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “The Scrapbook,” however, is fiction, a debut novel inspired by her grandfather’s attic trove, which she had heard about, but hadn’t seen, until after his funeral.“I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide,” she said.Clark was seated with the album open in front of her recently, at a long table in the gray clapboard house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., she shares with her husband, two children and many walls of books.A photograph from Bud Clark’s scrapbook shows an Army buddy taking in the view of a French harbor from atop a river barge.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWe 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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    Read the Supreme Court’s Decision on Transgender Care for Minors

    26

    UNITED STATES v. SKRMETTI

    SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting

    espouse support for transgender individuals. 13
    Transgender persons, moreover, have a defining charac- teristic (incongruence between sex and gender identity) that plainly “bears no relation to [the individual’s] ability to perform or contribute to society.”” Cleburne, 473 U. S., at 441. As a group, the class is no more “large, diverse, and amorphous,”” ante, at 4 (opinion of BARRETT, J.); ante, at 14 (ALITO, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), than most races or ethnic groups, many of which similarly include individuals with “a huge variety”” of identities and experiences, ante, at 5 (opinion of BARRETT, J.). (Not all racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, for example, “carry an obvious badge’ of their membership in the disadvan- taged class.” Cf. ante, at 16 (opinion of ALITO, J.).) 14 As evidenced by the recent rise in discriminatory state and fed- eral policies and the fact that transgender people “are un- derrepresented in every branch of government,” Grimm, 972 F. 3d, at 611–613, moreover, the class lacks the politi- cal power to vindicate its interests before the very legisla- tures and executive agents actively singling them out for discriminatory treatment. See Lyng v. Castillo, 477 U. S. 635, 638 (1986). In refusing to say as much, the Court today renders transgender Americans doubly vulnerable to state- sanctioned discrimination.¹

    13 See Order, United States v. Shilling, No. 24A1030 (2025); see also Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Bi- ological Truth to the Federal Government, Exec. Order No. 14168, 90 Fed. Reg. 8615 (2025).
    14 See, e.g., L. Noe-Bustamante, A. Gonzalez-Barrera, K. Edwards, L. Mora, & M. Hugo Lopez, Measuring the Racial Identity of Latinos, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnic-
    ity/2021/11/04/measuring-the-racial-identity-of-latinos/

    (highlighting

    the range of self-reported skin color among people who identify as La- tino).
    15 Of course, regardless of whether transgender persons constitute a suspect class, courts must strike down any law that reflects the kind of “irrational prejudice” that this Court has recognized as an illegitimate More

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    How Florida’s Attempt to Let Teens Sleep Longer Fell Apart

    After lawmakers required high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., school administrators complained that it was unworkable. Last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a repeal.Florida’s brief attempt to let high school students sleep longer began two years ago when one of the state’s most powerful politicians listened to an audiobook.The book, “Why We Sleep,” argues that sufficient sleep is fundamental to nearly every aspect of human functioning. Paul Renner, then the Republican speaker of the State House, said reading it turned him into a “sleep evangelist”; he started tracking his own sleep and pressing the book on other lawmakers.To give teenagers more time to rest, he pushed for a new law that would require public high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. and middle schools no earlier than 8 a.m. In 2023, Florida became only the second state — after California, its political opposite — to adopt such a requirement, and it asked schools to comply by 2026.“School start times are one of those issues that both Republicans and Democrats can get behind,” Mr. Renner said in an interview.This year, it all fell apart.Facing growing opposition from school administrators who said the later times were unworkable and costly, the Legislature repealed the requirement last month.Florida’s experiment was over before it began, an example of a policy driven by a single powerful lawmaker that flopped once he was termed out of office. It also illustrates how, even as concerns grow about the well-being of American teenagers, a modest scheduling shift with broad support from scientific and medical experts can struggle to gain traction.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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    In a Year of Working Dangerously, Fear of Trump Marks Public Service Awards

    The Trump administration’s large cuts to the federal work force turned an annual celebration of federal workers into a reminder of loss.Every year in Washington, hundreds of federal workers put on gowns and tuxedos to honor colleagues who battle disease, pursue criminals and invent new technology, in what is billed as the Oscars of public service. Tearful honorees call co-workers and families onstage, and cabinet secretaries and the president offer thanks in person or by video.Things looked different this year.These are difficult times to be a nonpartisan federal expert, as the Trump administration has cast civil servants as villains and forced out a quarter-million of them. For the first time in the two-decade history of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, the federal employee of the year — the biggest honor — was no longer a federal employee.David Lebryk, a former top Treasury Department official, was forced out of his career position for refusing to grant Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency what he considered unlawful access to the government’s payment system.In accepting his award on Tuesday night, Mr. Lebryk noted that “most of my career was spent trying to be unnoticed.” But he referred to the circumstances that led to his resignation, and offered a credo for public service.“It is important to exercise principled leadership, make difficult decisions, have the courage and conviction to stand behind those decisions and be accountable and ultimately prepared to accept the consequences of those decisions,” he said.There were no other acceptance speeches for awards given at the event — a departure from previous years — because some honorees said they were fearful of even inadvertently irking the administration. At least one winner turned down the award because the worker’s boss, a Trump appointee, forbade the worker to accept it.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