Aurelia Butler

Nadine Gordimer’s stories; Margaret Atwood’s sketches.Librado Romero/The New York TimesDear readers,How’s your attention span these days? Mine seems to have surrendered almost completely to fidgety unrest, an anti-flow state you might call gerbil-esque (fuzzy, skittering, frequently stuck on a wheel).Nobody wants to go full hamster. So it helps to have a day job that relies at least in part on getting lost in literature; the reliable lure of other voices, other rooms. But often lately I find myself reaching for great minds in small doses, concentrated pellets of wisdom and perspective that I can hold in one hand. And I have found myself especially soothed by the pithier works of two famously sharp women not known for suffering fools.Which is not to say that the books in this week’s newsletter are devoid of whimsy or delight. Intermittently, there are dips into the strange and fantastical; sometimes even a recipe (for poison, but still). Both bring a welcome bite and astringency to their tone, a sort of bracing witch hazel for the soul.—Leah“Loot and Other Stories,” by Nadine GordimerFiction, 2003We 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

Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government; the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people and the very concept of diversity itself; the demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords; and the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out.The actions of this presidency need to be tracked, and when they cross moral or legal lines, they need to be challenged, boldly and thoughtfully, with the confidence that the nation’s system of checks and balances will prove up to the task. There are reasons for concern on that front, of course. The Republican-led Congress has so far abdicated its role as a coequal branch of government, from allowing its laws and spending directives to be systematically cast aside to fearfully assenting to the president stocking his cabinet with erratic, unqualified loyalists. Much of civil society — from the business community, to higher education, to parts of the corporate media — has been disturbingly quiet, even acquiescent.But there are encouraging signs as well. The courts, the most important check on a president who aims to expand his legally authorized powers and remove any guardrails, so far have held, blocking a number of Mr. Trump’s initiatives. States have also taken action, with several Democratic attorneys general suing over Mr. Trump’s attempts to freeze federal grant funding and end birthright citizenship and vowing to fight Elon Musk’s team’s access to federal payment systems containing personal information. State or local officials are also defending their laws in the face of federal immigration raids and fighting Mr. Trump’s executive order barring gender-affirming medical care for transgender children. And independent-minded journalism organizations have continued excellent reporting on the fire hose of excesses of these early days, bringing essential information to the public.None of this is to say that Mr. Trump shouldn’t have the opportunity to govern. Seventy-seven million Americans cast ballots to put Mr. Trump back in the White House, and the Republican Party, now fully remade in service of the MAGA movement, holds majorities in both houses of Congress. Elections, it is often noted, have consequences. But is this unconstitutional overhaul of the American government — far more sweeping, haphazard and cruel than anything he campaigned on — really what those voters signed up for? To put America’s system of checks and balances, its alliances and its national security at risk? Because, beyond the bluster, that is what Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and their supporters are doing.Three weeks into the second Trump term, here are a handful of the places where Americans can’t afford to turn away:Elon Musk’s Executive Takeover. The problem is not that Mr. Musk is unelected, it’s that he is breaking the law. Not even a full-time government employee, he is trying to unilaterally shut down or dismantle entire federal agencies and departments, ignoring congressional mandates — this is prohibited by the Constitution. He and his team are behind the announced buyout offers to millions of civil servants — including the entire C.I.A. work force — and have effectively forced out top officials whom he has no power to fire. He is on a mission to rampage through the government’s confidential payment systems with an anarchist’s glee, deciding on his own which aspects of federal spending are legitimate, and substituting his instinctual embrace of conspiracy theories for any effort to understand the government functions he’s undermining.Both the president and Mr. Musk seem to relish that most of their actions are plainly illegal, daring the courts to step in and stop them, on the theory that these laws are flawed to begin with. At the same time, you have the richest man in the world leading this effort, still holding interests in his private companies, which do billions of dollars in business with and are regulated by the federal government. It’s a level of conflict of interest unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era.The Administration vs. Public Officials (a.k.a. Trump’s Enemies). Along with terminating more than a dozen members of the U.S. Attorneys Office in Washington who’d worked on cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, the Trump administration began collecting the names of thousands of F.B.I. personnel who helped to investigate crimes associated with the attack on the Capitol. Several top-ranking officials at the agency have already been fired. The move offered an early glimpse at how Mr. Trump and his nominee to run the F.B.I., Kash Patel — who published a literal enemies list of “Executive Branch Deep State” members — might use federal law enforcement against the president’s political opponents. In perhaps the most disturbing warning to those who might think to question or defy him, Mr. Trump stripped several of his former advisers of security protection that was deemed necessary given credible threats by the Iranian government to assassinate them for actions they took under his direct order.The President’s Imperial Bluster and Attacks on Allies. Mr. Trump has spent weeks coyly suggesting the United States is on the verge of illegally seizing territory on three continents, leaving all levels of consternation in his wake. Then there are his long-planned, seemingly legal — even if extremely ill advised — tariffs. All the threats and insults have gained Mr. Trump some short-term concessions, but none are likely to make America’s economy stronger or make America safer in the world. Running roughshod over centuries-old alliances will hurt the targeted countries, but it also could compromise national security, raise the price of goods, disrupt global commerce, benefit adversaries like China and Russia that are eager to fill the void of an increasingly distrusted America.Public Health Imperiled. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal vaccine skeptic, has not been confirmed as Mr. Trump’s health and human services secretary yet. But the administration is already taking steps to weaken and wreck public and global health protections. On Thursday, The Times reported that the administration plans to reduce the staff of more than 10,000 Americans at the U.S. Agency for International Development to only about 300 people, and cancel nearly 800 awards and contracts the agency administered. The president — much less Mr. Musk — cannot shut down a federal agency without a vote by Congress. To do so is also illegal under the Constitution. More than half of U.S.A.I.D.’s spending in 2023 went to health programs intended to stop the spread of diseases, such as polio, Ebola, tuberculosis, H.I.V./AIDS and malaria or to humanitarian assistance to respond to emergencies and help stabilize war-torn regions. If you care about preventing the next pandemic or the pressures of global migration, U.S.A.I.D. is an investment you should want the United States to make.The President’s Anti-Civil Rights Blitz. Mr. Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders and pronouncements that set back decades of progress on civil rights and often openly defy the Constitution. He has especially targeted transgender Americans and has threatened federal funding for public schools that do not adhere to right-wing ideology about how history and race should be discussed. He has also found nearly daily excuses to rail against diversity, equity and inclusion policies, even blaming D.E.I. for the Jan. 29 air crash in Washington and strongly implying that any air traffic controller who is a woman or not white is inferior and has been given a job for the wrong reasons. And the new attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced on Wednesday that private companies that choose to maintain their own diversity and inclusion policies could be targeted for “criminal investigations.”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

In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible.Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out.I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will.The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.”Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories.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

When we think about any addiction, we tend to focus on people who are utterly consumed by it — those whose lives are visibly falling apart. Yet gambling challenges our usual assumptions about addiction and risk, as its harms extend far beyond the most severe cases.Consider a young man from my therapy practice, a former college athlete, who isn’t bankrupt or in crisis but feels stuck in a cycle of unhealthy online sports betting. He repeatedly deletes the betting app from his phone, only to reinstall it days later at the prompting of a well-timed email, a group bet with friends or simply the ads plastered across every sports arena. He does fine at work and mostly keeps to the dollar limits he sets, but his internal preoccupation, restlessness and chasing of losses just feel bad. He wouldn’t call himself addicted, but he doesn’t feel healthy, either. At the very least, he has the creeping sense that he’d feel better if he put his attention and energy toward something more meaningful.Serious gambling addiction is devastating. Beyond financial ruin, it increases the risk of physical health problems, domestic violence and family rupture. Every year, 2.5 million American adults suffer from severe gambling problems. Many suffer invisibly, silently wagering away their lives on cellphones, perhaps in the very same room as their family and friends.These severe cases demand attention, but focusing only on them obscures something important. As a physician and someone in recovery from alcohol and stimulant addiction myself, I’m concerned by how we have been conditioned to see addiction in all-or-nothing terms. Beyond the millions of Americans who meet the criteria for gambling disorder, five million to eight million more have a mild to moderate gambling problem that still affects their lives — like my patient. Since the federal ban on sports betting was struck down in 2018, sports gambling in the United States has exploded, with annual wagers now approaching $150 billion.Today’s surge of sports betting — supercharged by technology and unfettered industry practices — shows how everyone can struggle with self-control to varying degrees. No longer a simple matter of putting money down on which competitor will win, modern technology has transformed sports betting into a high-speed, continuous stream of wagers throughout the game. For Sunday’s Super Bowl, people can place bets on things from the result of the coin toss to the yardage of the next drive, from Kendrick Lamar’s halftime guests to how many times Taylor Swift is mentioned.Online gambling companies collect troves of personalized data to guide betting variables and marketing to match each user’s patterns and preferences. (The Athletic, which is owned by The New York Times, has a partnership with BetMGM, online sports betting and gaming company.) Subscription plans and automated deposits further erode the friction between impulse and action.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 question of what celebrities will wear to an awards show always looms large before any ceremony. But it took on new significance ahead of the 30th Critics Choice Awards in Santa Monica, Calif., on Friday: After postponing the event twice because of the Los Angeles wildfires, organizers announced that a red-carpet preshow would not be part of the televised broadcast.How might that decision influence the fashion choices of the television and movie stars in attendance? Would they be riskier? More relaxed?As people started arriving, it soon became clear that absence of TV cameras on the carpet hadn’t stopped most from taking big style swings. For myriad reasons — most of them good — these 14 looks were among the most memorable from the Critics Choice Awards.Nicole Kidman: Most Humphrey Bogart!Daniel Cole/ReutersInstead of a gown, the “Lioness” and “Babygirl” actress went with a broad-shouldered Saint Laurent suit jacket, high-waist pants and a polka-dot tie, an ensemble that evoked the men’s wear of Old Hollywood.Ariana Grande: Most Jellyfish!Allison Dinner/EPA, via ShutterstockWe 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

Here’s who went home a winner from the 30th annual Critics Choice Awards.See all the arrival photos from the 2025 Critics Choice Awards red carpet.The 30th annual Critics Choice Awards were held in Santa Monica, Calif., on Friday. Here’s who walked away with hardware from one of the last major bellwethers before the Oscars.FilmBest Picture“Anora”Best ActorAdrien Brody, “The Brutalist”Best ActressDemi Moore, “The Substance”Best Supporting ActorKieran Culkin, “A Real Pain”Best Supporting ActressZoe Saldaña, “Emilia Pérez”Best Young Actor or ActressMaisy Stella, “My Old Ass”Best Acting Ensemble“Conclave”Best DirectorJon M. Chu, “Wicked”Best Original ScreenplayCoralie Fargeat, “The Substance”Best Adapted ScreenplayPeter Straughan, “Conclave”Best CinematographyJarin Blaschke, “Nosferatu”Best Production DesignNathan Crowley and Lee Sandales, “Wicked”Best EditingMarco Costa, “Challengers”Best Costume DesignPaul Tazewell, “Wicked”Best Hair and MakeupStéphanie Guillon, Frédérique Arguello and Pierre-Olivier Persin; “The Substance”Best Visual EffectsPaul Lambert, Stephen James, Rhys Salcombe and Gerd Nefzer; “Dune: Part Two”Best Animated Feature“The Wild Robot”Best Comedy“A Real Pain”“Deadpool & Wolverine”Best Foreign Language Film“Emilia Pérez”Best Song“El Mal,” from “Emilia Pérez”Best ScoreTrent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Challengers”TelevisionBest Drama Series“Shogun”Best Actor, Drama SeriesHiroyuki Sanada, “Shogun”Best Actress, Drama SeriesKathy Bates, “Matlock”Best Supporting Actor, Drama SeriesTadanobu Asano, “Shogun”Best Supporting Actress, Drama SeriesMoeka Hoshi, “Shogun”Best Comedy Series“Hacks”Best Actor, Comedy SeriesAdam Brody, “Nobody Wants This”Best Actress, Comedy SeriesJean Smart, “Hacks”Best Supporting Actor, Comedy SeriesMichael Urie, “Shrinking”Best Supporting Actress, Comedy SeriesHannah Einbinder, “Hacks”Best Limited Series“Baby Reindeer”Best TV Movie“Rebel Ridge”Best Actor, Limited Series or TV MovieColin Farrell, “The Penguin”Best Actress, Limited Series or TV MovieCristin Milioti, “The Penguin”Best Supporting Actor, Limited Series or TV MovieLiev Schreiber, “The Perfect Couple”Best Supporting Actress, Limited Series or TV MovieJessica Gunning, “Baby Reindeer”Best Foreign Language Series“Squid Game”Best Animated Series“X-Men ’97”Best Talk Show“John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A.”Best Comedy Special“Ali Wong: Single Lady” More

The clause is included in a disputed plea agreement between a Pentagon official and the man accused of planning the attacks that killed 3,000 people.Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the prisoner at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who is accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, has agreed to never disclose secret aspects of his torture by the C.I.A. if he is allowed to plead guilty rather than face a death-penalty trial.The clause was included in the latest portions of his deal to be unsealed at a federal appeals court in Washington. A three-judge panel is considering whether former Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III lawfully withdrew from a plea agreement with Mr. Mohammed in the capital case against five men who are accused of conspiring in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000.The C.I.A. has never taken a public position on whether it supports the deal, and the agency declined to comment on Friday. But the latest disclosure makes clear that Mr. Mohammed would not be allowed to publicly identify people, places and other details from his time in the agency’s secret prisons overseas from 2003 to 2006.It has been publicly known for years that Mr. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times by the C.I.A. It has also been revealed that waterboarding was done by a three-person interrogation team led by Bruce Jessen and James E. Mitchell, two former contract psychologists for the agency. Details of Mr. Mohammed’s violent treatment, including rectal abuse, have emerged in court filings and leaks.But the agency has protected the names of other people who worked in the “black site” prisons, notably medical staff, guards and other intelligence agency employees. That includes the people who questioned Mr. Mohammed hundreds of times as he was shuttled between prisons in Afghanistan, Poland and other locations, which the C.I.A. has not acknowledged as former black sites.Now, a recently unredacted paragraph in Mr. Mohammed’s 20-page settlement says he agreed not to disclose “any form, in any manner, or by any means” information about his “capture, detention, confinement of himself or others” while in U.S. custody.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

President Trump on Friday ordered that all foreign assistance to South Africa be halted and said his administration would prioritize the resettling of white, “Afrikaner refugees” into the United States because of what he called actions by the country’s government that “racially disfavored landowners.”In the order, Mr. Trump said that “the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that American officials should do everything possible to help “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”It follows Mr. Trump’s accusation on his social media site on Sunday that the South African government was engaged in a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum.” He vowed a full investigation and promised to cut off aid.“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” the president wrote in the post. “It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention.”The order was stunning in providing official American backing to long-held conspiracy theories about the mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.Mr. Trump has made repeated claims without evidence that echoed those conspiracy theories. In 2018, he ordered his secretary of state to look into “the large scale killing of farmers” — a claim disputed by official figures and the country’s biggest farmers’ group.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