On This Week’s Episode:People immersed in chaos try to solve for what it all adds up to.Getty ImagesNew York Times Audio is home to the “This American Life” archive. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More
The United States has been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace plan that seems in part a gift to Moscow. But the short meeting of the leaders, and subsequent comments, appeared to be a change in tone.President Trump’s standing among Ukrainians is practically on life support. But many cheered one statement he made on Saturday after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky, questioning why President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would continue to pummel Ukraine as the United States is trying to broker peace talks.“It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social after meeting with Mr. Zelensky on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral, adding that Mr. Putin may need to be “dealt with differently” — with more sanctions. The day’s events were a victory of sorts for Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine at a critical juncture in the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The United States has been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace plan that seems in part a gift to Moscow. The proposal would force Kyiv to abandon its aspirations of joining NATO, offer Ukraine only vague security guarantees, and see the United States officially recognizing Crimea as Russian. Ukraine has rejected that deal, which the Trump administration had described as its final offer.But now, Ukrainians see a small glimmer of hope that Mr. Trump will not try to force Ukraine into a lopsided peace plan. It first emerged in the fallout from a massive Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s capital early Thursday that killed 12 people and injured almost 90. “Vladimir, STOP!” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, in a rare rebuke of Mr. Putin.And then, the hope grew slightly on Saturday when Mr. Zelensky managed to wrangle about 15 minutes with Mr. Trump in Rome. Photos released by the Ukrainian government showed the two men sitting in chairs and leaning toward each other, talking like equals — a vastly different scene than a disastrous meeting in the Oval Office in late February that ended with Mr. Zelensky’s abrupt departure from the White House and the temporary freezing of all U.S. aid.The photos from Rome “were extraordinary,” said Volodymyr Dubovyk, the director of the Center for International Studies at Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University. He added that it was good for Mr. Zelensky to have some time alone with Mr. Trump.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
<!–> Opinion –>Trump’sBiggestBeneficiary:Himself<!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> [!–> <!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [!–><!–> –> <!–> –><!–> ]–> Opinion Guest Essay Trump’s Biggest Beneficiary: Himself No presidential administration is completely free from questionable ethics practices, but Donald Trump has pushed us to a new low. He has accomplished that by breaking every norm of good government, often […] More
More from our inbox:Depression and AgingPaul Revere’s Legacy Robert Gumpert/ReduxTo the Editor:“I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future,” by Thomas L. Friedman (column, April 17), is an alarm we all need to hear. His main point couldn’t be clearer: The things that have made America strong — our rule of law, our global partnerships and our ability to lead in innovation — are being systematically undermined by a leader more focused on revenge than building a future.While other countries, like China, are investing in clean energy, advanced technology and long-term strategy, we’re clinging to the past and isolating ourselves in the process. If we don’t start paying attention, demanding accountability and thinking beyond the next news cycle, we will wake up in a country that’s poorer, more divided and left behind.We ignore Mr. Friedman’s warning at our own peril.Robert StewartChantilly, Va.To the Editor:Like Thomas L. Friedman, I have never been more afraid for my country’s future. But not because of the mistaken economic policies he focuses upon, dangerous as those may be. By far the most dangerous and repugnant reality of President Trump’s second term is his ongoing violation of constitutional guardrails and democratic norms so that he can assume a level of power never intended for any president.This threat is not simply an undesirable context for potentially fatal economic actions, as Mr. Friedman indicates. Rather, those guardrails are more fundamental to a strong economic future than any particular policy action. Even more important, they are absolutely essential to the decent society that economic activity and government are supposed to promote.Robert WardAlbany, N.Y.To the Editor:Thomas L. Friedman’s column captures, with characteristic urgency and clarity, the Trump administration’s surrealism and strategic incoherence.His critique of President Trump’s nostalgia-driven economic nationalism — especially the fetishization of coal at the expense of clean technology innovation — is timely and damning. Few writers can as effectively tie in the everyday absurdities of this administration to their long-term global implications.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 British police arrested a man on Saturday after an attack in Leeds, a city in northern England.Counterterrorism police in Britain are investigating an attack on Saturday that “seriously injured” two women in the northern English city of Leeds. The police said that they had recovered a crossbow and a firearm.The police arrested a 38-year-old man, who was taken to the hospital with what they called a “self-inflicted injury.”They said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack, which happened on Saturday afternoon, and that the motive for the violence remained under investigation.“Clearly this has been a shocking incident,” said Carl Galvin, an assistant chief constable with the West Yorkshire Police, the force that led the initial police operation. He thanked civilians and emergency responders for helping the victims.“We would strongly urge people not to speculate online or share information or footage which could affect the active investigation,” he added.The incident comes amid debates about violence and terrorism in Britain, which is still reckoning with the killing of three young girls last July in Southport, in northwest England. The knife attack last year set off rioting, which was inflamed by disinformation and far-right agitators.Knife crime is more common than crossbow attacks in Britain, but the use of the weapon is not without precedent in the country. Last July, a man with a crossbow killed three women in London — his ex-partner, who had recently ended their relationship, as well as her sister and their mother.A separate crossbow attack, which the police said resulted in non-life-threatening injuries, was reported in London in March last year. More
We explain how a few big players wield enormous influence in the art world.Museums provide the first draft of art history. They decide which artists get to share wall space with masters like Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso.Choosing which artists to exhibit requires museums to consider ultrasubjective questions about, say, the artistic merit of a painting or the historical relevance of a sculpture. The task has traditionally fallen to curators, who maintain their scholarly independence and grapple with the complexities of mounting shows.But in recent years, museums have increasingly turned to another source for logistical and, at times, financial support for their shows: major commercial art galleries.The scale of these partnerships was largely unexamined until now. This morning, The Times published an analysis by my colleague Julia Halperin and me of more than 350 solo exhibitions by contemporary artists in New York’s biggest art museums over the last six years.We found that nearly a quarter of those exhibitions featured artists who were represented by just 11 major galleries. These were no ordinary mom-and-pop dealerships but “mega-galleries,” as professionals call them — an elite slice of the art world that accounts for a sizable chunk of the $57.5 billion art market.In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how the increasingly close relationship between museums and commercial galleries is shaping whose work is shown to the public.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
Like many of its conservative alumni, I have a complicated relationship with Harvard.I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, where I went to public school. I attended college at a small Christian university in Nashville. I never had a thought that I could attend Harvard Law School. But friends urged me to try.When I got in, it was so shocking that it felt miraculous. I knew it would change my life — and it did. It gave me some of my closest friends, it gave me career opportunities I couldn’t previously fathom, and it kindled in me a love for constitutional law.At the same time, the school had profound problems. The student culture was remarkably intolerant and contentious. This was the height of early 1990s political correctness, and I was sometimes shouted down by angry classmates.In 1993, GQ published a long report from the law school called “Beirut on the Charles,” and it described a place that “pitted faculty members against faculty members, faculty members against students” and where students were “waging holy war on one another.”The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. In the 30 years since my graduation, the school has continued to change lives, and it has maintained one of the least tolerant cultures in American higher education.For the second year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression (where I served as president a number of years ago) has ranked Harvard last in the country in its annual free speech rankings. The environment, FIRE determined, was “abysmal.”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
Alexandra Sifferlin, a health and science editor for Times Opinion, hosted a written conversation with the Opinion columnist Ross Douthat and the Opinion writers Jessica Grose and David Wallace-Wells about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first two months as secretary of health and human services.Alexandra Sifferlin: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to tackle chronic disease and take on the food and pharmaceutical industries. But his response to a measles outbreak in the Southwest — and inflammatory remarks about autism at a press briefing — have drawn criticism from all sides.Ross, you’ve written about your own experiences with chronic illness and the limitations of the U.S. medical system. What’s been your view of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, and what do you make of his tenure as health leader so far?Ross Douthat: I think debates about the limitations of the U.S. medical system tend to be polarized in a very, shall we say, unhealthy way. On one side, you have people who haven’t hit the limits of medical consensus and knowledge in their own lives, and therefore struggle to understand why so many of their fellow citizens would want to wander outside those limits in search of answers or wisdom. On the other side, you have people with very good reasons for skepticism of conventional wisdom, but who have allowed that skepticism to become total, making them reject everything the establishment says while fastening onto a specific outsider narrative as an absolute alternative even if the evidence is lacking.On a lot of fronts, Kennedy and the MAHA movement exhibit the latter problem. There’s absolutely room for new research and new debate about the causes of chronic illness, or autism or obesity — all areas where the official understanding of things doesn’t have definite answers for a lot of people. And there’s always good reason for skepticism about the medical-industrial complex writ large. But Kennedy seems committed to his own set of low-evidence theories — the vaccine-autism link being the most prominent example — and he seems to be working backward from the outsider perspective, rather than trying to genuinely create dialogue between the establishment and its critics.David Wallace-Wells: I’m not sure it’s even just low-evidence theories. I worry about the quality of the evidence demonstrating the problem. One thing I’d really like to see an autism commission tackle is the seemingly simple question of to what degree we actually are really living through an epidemic. I think there are reasons to worry about an increase in cases, and about environmental factors contributing. But I also think the alarming charts you see showing exponential growth in prevalence are really not very credible, and yet they are what is powering our panic.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
