Elections

There is plenty of fun and truly adorable stuff in “Cute,” a new exhibition in London. But there are some creepy and unsettling things, too.Try this: Ask someone you know to define “cute.” They are not allowed to simply give an example of a cute thing, so no babies or sweet little rabbits singing a song about being brave; they must try and give a definition for the adjective itself. See how long it takes before words give way to gestures (hands making clutching motions, arms squeezing tightly around invisible teddy-bear-size objects) or inarticulate noises (cries of anguished delight, high-pitched vowel sounds). See how long it takes before they are scrunching up their faces in what looks a lot like pain.It’s not just that the term is difficult to define, it’s that there is often a confounding gap between the smallness, or seeming irrelevance, of the cute object, and the strength and range of the feelings it invokes. Words alone don’t seem to cover it.Cuteness — its properties, its uses and its increasingly dominant position in culture — is the subject of a dazzling new exhibition in London called simply “Cute,” running at Somerset House through April 14. Not exactly a history of an aesthetic and not exactly, or not only, a collection of particularly cute commodities, the show explores the unsettling power of apparently powerless things, looking at the fantasies that cuteness enables and creates, and making us think about how and why it has come to saturate our world.“Go On and Hit a Lick of Benevolence” by Sean-Kierre Lyons. The exhibition features several works of contemporary art.David Parry/Press Association for Somerset HouseWhy does everything have to be so cute now? What does it mean that we have so enthusiastically allowed ourselves to be manipulated by an aesthetic that prioritizes the infantile, the teeny-weeny, the doe-eyed? Why, when I saw a can of Hello Kitty-branded motor oil in one of the show’s first rooms, did I desperately want to pick it up and give it a big hug while shouting, “Awwwwwww?” Why am I trying to buy one on eBay right now? I don’t even have a car.If these questions give off a strong smell of the seminar room, do not be cast down: There is plenty of fun, and truly adorable stuff, to be consumed. Just ask the group of girls who were giddily twirling around taking selfies in the Hello Kitty disco room on the morning that I visited. (The show, in fact, is sponsored by Sanrio, the Japanese company that created Hello Kitty, and is timed to coincide with her 50th birthday this year. She’s 50 years old! According to a sign at the show, she was born in London on Nov. 1, dreams of becoming a poet and is the height of five apples! She doesn’t have a mouth!)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?  More

The atmospheric rivers could lead to flooding, mudslides and road closures over the next week.The flooded backyard of a house in San Diego last week.Ariana Drehsler for The New York TimesNo matter where you are in California, big storms are headed your way over the next several days. Forecasters are warning of back-to-back atmospheric rivers that could lead to flooding, mudslides and road closures between today and Tuesday.“We could very well receive February’s total normal precipitation within the month’s first five days,” forecasters from the National Weather Service’s office in San Diego wrote early Monday morning.California needs the rain to stave off drought. The state has gotten only about 81 percent of the total average rainfall expected by this time of year, and the snowpack is just 32 percent of average, according to state data. Water levels at reservoirs are still above average for this time of year because of the bounty of rain we received last winter, but they are not nearly as high as they were a year ago.The first storm reached the California coast last night, and it is expected to bring widespread rainfall and gusty winds to Northern California today before tapering off a bit and moving into Southern California tomorrow.It will pack a greater punch in the north than in the south, forecasters told me. Parts of Marin, Sonoma and Napa Counties are expected to get two to four inches of rain, and the Santa Cruz and Santa Lucia Mountains may get six inches, according to Nicole Sarment, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office. The North Coast is expected to get up to five inches of rain today and tomorrow.Flooding is expected in low-lying areas because the soil is already saturated from earlier storms, experts say. Heavy winds may knock down trees and power lines.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?  More

Frustrated that she and her partner live too far away from his parents to reap the benefits of free grandparental supervision, a reader wonders how to broach her feelings of being cheated.My partner’s parents have been financially dependent on him and his brother for 10 years. They are unable to work. Still, they have provided free child care for my brother-in-law’s two children for the past five years. Meanwhile, my partner has been paying half of his parents’ living expenses. I’ve stayed out of these arrangements; my partner and I keep our finances separate. But now that we have a baby of our own — and his parents live too far away to provide child care — I am resentful that my partner has been effectively subsidizing his brother’s child care rather than saving money for ours. I think his brother is taking advantage of us. My partner is very sensitive about this; he doesn’t think grandparents should be compensated for child care. How can I approach this subject without creating tension?SISTER-IN-LAWI would drop the issue. You are looking at it too narrowly. Your partner and his brother are probably paying their parents’ living expenses out of gratitude, or maybe a sense of duty, after a lifetime of love and support from them. Your desire for a ledger adjustment based solely on child care — an accounting that your partner doesn’t want, for money that isn’t yours — seems off base to me.You are absolutely entitled to your feelings, of course. But isn’t the point of separate finances with your partner to insulate you and him from objections like this? As long as he pays his agreed share of joint expenses, he has done his part. And you haven’t said that money is tight.In my experience, parents often provide different kinds of support to their children. My parents helped me pay for expensive schools, for instance, while they helped my brother buy a home. Other than this child care issue, we have no window on your partner’s family, and I see no upside in pressing your case. (On a related note: If you had offered to pay my mother to take care of her beloved grandchildren, she would have laughed in your face.)Miguel PorlanHopefully the Relaxation Lingers as Long as the Scent?My husband loves to have massages at home. He’s done it for years — long before I moved in. The problem: His massage therapist wears a heavy scent that bothers me and lingers in the house. When we asked her about it, she said, “I don’t wear perfume.” But something she uses has a strong scent. (It’s not massage oil.) More troubling, though, is my husband’s lack of concern. He has a less sensitive nose than I do and just keeps saying it’s “so weird” that the smell bothers me. Can you help?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?  More

A Delaware court ruling on his $50 billion compensation plan at Tesla raises questions about corporate governance and more.Elon Musk may be forced to give up a grant of Tesla shares worth over $50 billion.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe big stakes of Musk’s outsize pay dealAn unusual pay package that Tesla devised in 2018 helped make Elon Musk the world’s wealthiest individual.But a Delaware judge’s ruling that the arrangement was unfair to other Tesla shareholders raises questions about much more than Musk’s net worth, including control of his companies and his ability to fund them — and how corporate leaders are paid.The backstory: In 2018, Tesla set out 12 milestones tied to market capitalization, revenue and profit targets that Musk needed to reach to qualify for a stock package that is now worth over $50 billion. Experts thought it would be impossible to hit. Yet Musk — who told Andrew at the time that Tesla would hit a $1 trillion market cap within a decade — pulled it off. (He hasn’t taken possession of the shares yet.)Shareholders sued, however, arguing that the plan was devised unfairly, with Musk essentially creating his own pay package with the help of allies on the Tesla board.Those shares are now at risk of disappearing. “The process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed,” Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware’s Court of Chancery (who has been blunt in hearings with Musk before) wrote in her decision, ordering that the contract be voided.There’s a lot at stake:Questions about the Tesla board’s independence are being asked as the car maker’s directors weigh a demand by Musk for more control of the company, lest he start moving highly anticipated A.I. projects to other parts of his business empire.Musk has taken out stock margin loans to finance parts of his business empire. He may find it harder to come up with cash if X needs more money, for example.And corporate governance experts say the ruling is a warning to other business leaders. “It establishes that there is such a thing as excessive compensation,” Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive research group, told The Times.Some legal experts think any Musk appeal faces tough odds. He will probably appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, they say. But Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School, told DealBook that chancellors like McCormick historically have wide latitude to rule on such punishments.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?  More

Nathan Hale makes his New York Times debut.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — Among the especially fitness-conscious, the days of the week may be remembered not as they appear on the Gregorian calendar but by the parts of the body that get exercised on them. Leg day, I am told, is the Monday of workouts.Since I’m more of a mental-fitness buff myself, I like to think of Wednesday as my brain day. It is on this day that the crossword invariably pushes my wits to their limits in ways that no other days’ crosswords do. For example, in today’s grid — his New York Times debut! — Nathan Hale has crafted a two-part theme that blends wordplay and trivia. His deftly worded clues also require some patient rereading. I managed to solve the puzzle, with some effort, but I think I pulled something in my frontal lobe.Shall we do some reps together?Today’s ThemeIf you are the kind of crossword purist who prefers your theme content neat as a pin, with no additional enjoyment beyond that which is required to solve the puzzle, then you may be disappointed by Mr. Hale’s antics in today’s grid. He has chosen to give us additional wordplay at no extra charge, albeit with little relevance to the final reveal at 51-Across.Question marks punctuate themed clues at 20-, 34- and 41-Across. All of the entries for these clues follow a similar pattern of punning: One who “Prepared to fight Goliath?” (20A) READIED A ROCK, for example, which plays on the sound of the common expression “ready to rock.” To have “Invested on Broadway, say?” (41A) is to have BACKED A WORK (sounds like: back to work). Mr. Hale’s central theme, however, hinges on noticing what these witty Across answers do to the gray-shaded ones at 6-, 24- and 29-Down.Did you notice what a certain “Presidential nickname of the early 20th century” (6D) had in common with an “Owie” (24D) and “Motown legend Robinson” (29D)? TEDDY, BOO-BOO and SMOKEY are the names of famous bears. And each of today’s themed Across entries “Betrayed Paddington?” (51A) — that is to say, they CROSSED A BEAR.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?  More

Just $300,000 is on hold after Israeli claims that UNRWA employees joined the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, U.S. officials say.The State Department downplayed the significance on Tuesday of its decision to pause funding for the main U.N. aid agency in Gaza, explaining that it had already provided virtually all the money allocated by Congress for that purpose and that the Biden administration hoped the matter could be resolved quickly.More than 99 percent of American dollars approved by Congress for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, has been sent to the agency, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said on Tuesday.The State Department paused the money “temporarily” on Friday after accusations by Israel that a dozen UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, with some holding hostages within Gaza. At least 17 other donor nations have also suspended their funding to the agency, according to the group U.N. Watch.Human rights groups and progressive Democrats in Congress have denounced the move, saying that it will deprive innocent Palestinians of desperately needed aid. But Mr. Miller said the State Department had sent all but $300,000 of about $121 million budgeted for UNRWA to the agency, suggesting that the near-term effect of the U.S. action within Gaza will be minor.U.S. officials suggested that the real question is how much more money Congress will be willing to approve for an agency that many Republicans condemn for what they call anti-Israel bias and Hamas sympathies. Underscoring that uncertainty, witnesses at a House subcommittee hearing on Tuesday denounced UNRWA and called for its restructuring or replacement.Israel’s government says that at least 12 employees of the agency participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and that UNRWA employs as many as 1,300 Hamas members. Israel estimates that the attack left roughly 1,200 people dead; another 240 people were taken hostage.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?  More

Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council, has become one of Mayor Eric Adams’s most powerful critics as he struggles with crises and low approval ratings.As Mayor Eric Adams battles low poll ratings, a federal investigation and potential challengers to his re-election in New York City, a Democratic ally has emerged as an unexpected adversary: Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker.Ms. Adams, who shares many of the mayor’s moderate stances, has become one of his most powerful and vocal critics, unifying the most diverse City Council ever and empowering it as a forceful wedge against him.On Tuesday, Ms. Adams led the Council in overriding the mayor’s vetoes of a bill banning the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails and another bill requiring police officers to record the race, age and gender of most people they stop.The actions were an unusual rebuke of a New York City mayor by his Democratic colleagues: It was only the second time in nearly a decade that the Council has overridden a mayor’s veto.When she was chosen as Council speaker in 2022, Ms. Adams was seen as a compromise candidate, a moderate Democrat who could work with Mayor Adams without being beholden to him. But in recent months, she has begun to regularly play the role of political antagonist to the mayor.She has questioned Mr. Adams’s management of the budget and criticized his approach to handling the influx of migrants as inhumane. She prompted the Council to pass the bills banning solitary confinement and improving police accountability, despite the mayor’s objections, and carried enough support to override his vetoes.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?  More

The life-size bronze tribute to the legendary baseball player who broke the color barrier was stolen from a different park last week. What was left of it “is beyond repair,” officials said.Parts of a life-size bronze statue that celebrated the legacy of the legendary baseball player and civil rights figure Jackie Robinson were found dismantled and burned early Tuesday after it had been stolen from a Kansas park last week, the authorities said.Remnants of the statue were found after a city worker reported a fire in a trash can at Garvey Park in Wichita at around 8:38 a.m., Andrew Ford, a police spokesman, said in a statement.The Wichita Fire Department responded and, “while assessing the damage, they found pieces of the Jackie Robinson statue that had been stolen.”The Fire Department immediately notified the police, who collected the pieces at the scene, he said, noting that “unfortunately, the statue is beyond repair.”The police are continuing to investigate, Mr. Ford said, and they have “already interviewed over 100 people.” The department is also looking into how the statue was dismantled and how the pieces ended up at the location of the fire. Mr. Ford had previously said that the motive for the theft of the monument was not known.Additionally, the Fire Department’s arson investigators are looking into the trash can fire, he said. In a statement posted on Facebook, the department said that “additional parts of the statue have not been recovered at this time.”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?  More