Elections

Companies like Amazon have required a return to the office five days a week despite findings showing benefits to employers that allow some remote days.Amazon’s C.E.O., Andy Jassy, made waves last month when he demanded that all employees return to the office five days a week. The proclamation seemed to validate similar demands made by executives like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon. And it naturally raised the question of whether others might follow suit. (It appears some have.)But it also flew in the face of researchers and their studies that have found hybrid work benefits companies. Stanford’s Nick Bloom, for example, has found that employees who work two days a week at home are just as productive and less likely to quit. (Bloom, like others, speculated that Amazon’s pronouncement was really an attempt to reduce the work force without official layoffs.)So why do so many employers that say they’re data-driven seem to move counter to science?Executives are not convinced by the research. “It’s not like: ‘Aspirin definitely helps with headaches. It’s been proven again and again and again,’” Laszlo Bock, a former senior vice president for people operations at Google, told DealBook. “The academic studies that have been done, and there are not that many, show a range of outcomes — and they generally show a kind of neutral to slightly positive.”Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, said he disagreed, pointing DealBook to a meta-analysis of 108 studies.Some are just over it. Almost five years since the start of the pandemic, many C.E.O.s are ready to move on from an experiment they never wanted to start. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote in a memo about ending remote work at Amazon.Grant says C.E.O.s may not always methodically control for whether an effect was caused by remote work, the pandemic or something else, as an academic researcher would. 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

Being uncertain about our earlier poll results but finding almost the same numbers the next time around.A recent rally for Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh. Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAt the end of our last wave of post-debate battleground polls, there were two state poll results that didn’t seem to fit the rest.One was Pennsylvania: Kamala Harris led by four percentage points, making it her best result in the battlegrounds. It was our only state poll conducted immediately after the debate, when her supporters might have been especially excited to respond to a poll.The other was Arizona: Donald J. Trump led by five points, making it his best result among the battlegrounds. Even stranger, it was a huge swing from our previous poll of the state, which Vice President Harris had led by five points.In both cases, it seemed possible that another New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll would yield a significantly different result. With that in mind, we decided to take an additional measure of Arizona and Pennsylvania before our final polls at the end of the month.The result? Essentially the same as our prior polls.Ms. Harris leads by four points in Pennsylvania, just as she did immediately after the final debate.Mr. Trump leads by six points in Arizona, about the same as the five-point lead he held three weeks ago.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

Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.I asked James Carville if Kamala’s problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of color. The Ragin’ Cajun chided me.“We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and Election Day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington.”Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.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

True political courage — the principled stand, the elevation of country over party pressure, the willingness to sacrifice a career to protect the common good — has become painfully rare in a polarized world. It deserves to be celebrated and nurtured whenever it appears, especially in defense of fundamental American institutions like our election system. The sad truth, too, is the country will probably need a lot more of it in the coming months.In state after state, Republicans have systematically made it harder for citizens to vote, and harder for the election workers who count those votes to do so. They are challenging thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas, forcing administrators to manually restore perfectly legitimate voters to the rolls. They are aggressively threatening election officials who defended the 2020 election against manipulation. They are trying to invalidate mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they meet the legal requirements of a postmark before the deadline. They are making it more difficult to certify election results, and even trying to change how states apportion their electors, in hopes of making it easier for Donald Trump to win or even help him overturn an election loss.Though many of these moves happened behind closed doors, this campaign is hardly secret. And last month, Mr. Trump directly threatened to prosecute and imprison election officials around the country who disagree with his lies.Against this kind of systematic assault on the institutions and processes that undergird American democracy, the single most important backstop are the public servants, elected and volunteer, who continue to do their jobs.Consider Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator from Nebraska, who showed how it’s done when he announced last month that he would not bow to an intense, last-minute pressure campaign by his party’s national leaders, including former President Trump, to help slip an additional electoral vote into Mr. Trump’s column.Currently, Nebraska awards most of its electors by congressional district, and while most of the state is safely conservative, polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris poised to win the elector from the Second Congressional District, which includes the state’s biggest city, Omaha. In the razor-thin margins of the 2024 election, this could be the vote that determines the outcome. That was the intent of Republican lawmakers in Nebraska, who waited until it was too late for Democrats in Maine, which has a similar system, to change the state’s rules to prevent one congressional district from choosing a Republican elector.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

If Donald Trump wins, the people who voted for him would have a range of reasons for putting him in office. There are a lot of potential Trump voters who don’t like him that much, or who really like only parts of his personality or platform and tolerate the rest.There are probably also those who have their own understanding of what they’re getting, possibly rooted in the way they felt about the Trump administration or feel about the Biden one. Some of this could be summarized by how Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, pitched it recently: “Look, you may not like Donald Trump personally, but you’ll like his policies a lot better than Kamala Harris’s. It’s a business decision.”But how Mr. Trump understands that decision could be different. If he wins like this, how it’s been, how grim he’s taken things across the last two years but especially lately, his explanation for the victory — and the consequences of that reasoning — might be different and darker than even many of the people who voted for him wanted.The way he’s talked about towns like Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitians who officials have said are there legally to work resembles deeply the rhythms of the 2016 campaign: grim conflation of real and fake problems, real people caught up in the gears of awful scrutiny and abuse, the building pressure on politicians and people often in very normal and modest circumstances, and Mr. Trump weaving everything into a fable to prove that he was right.In his campaign speeches, intermixed with the jokes and riffs, Mr. Trump often talks about political retribution, the threat of World War III, the ruin that the country’s become. In just one speech, he talked about how he would “liberate” Wisconsin from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members,” and about how immigrant gangs had “occupied” “hundreds” of towns and cities across the Midwest, leaving law enforcement “petrified.”Mr. Trump seems to have twisted the reason that programs like Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole exist — for instance, Haiti has been deemed too unstable and dangerous to return to — into a reason for the programs not to exist. “So we have travel warnings,” he said. “‘Don’t go here, don’t go there, don’t go to the various countries’ and yet she’s taking in the worst of those people, the killers, the jailbirds, all of the worst of the people, she’s taking them in.”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

Scroll down for hints and conversation about the puzzle for Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024.Good morning, dear connectors. Welcome to today’s Connections forum, where you can give and receive puzzle — and emotional — support.Be warned: This article includes hints and comments that may contain spoilers for today’s puzzle. Solve Connections first, or scroll at your own risk.Connections is released at midnight in your time zone. In order to accommodate all time zones, there will be two Connections Companions live every day, dated based on Eastern Standard Time.If you find yourself on the wrong companion, check the number of your puzzle, and go to this page to find the corresponding companion.Post your solve grid in the comments and see how your score compares with the editor’s rating, and one another’s.Today’s difficultyThe difficulty of each puzzle is determined by averaging the ratings provided by a panel of testers who are paid to solve each puzzle in advance to help us catch bugs, inconsistencies and other issues. A higher rating means the puzzle is more difficult.Today’s difficulty is 3 out of 5.Need a hint?In Connections, each category has a different difficulty level. Yellow is the simplest, and purple is the most difficult. Click or tap each level to reveal one of the words in that category. 🟨 StraightforwardNAIL🟩 ⬇️ANVIL🟦 ⬇️STIRRUP🟪 TrickyEGGFurther ReadingWant to give us feedback? Email us: [email protected] to go back to Connections?Want to learn more about how the game is made?Leave any thoughts you have in the comments! Please follow community guidelines:Be kind. Comments are moderated for civility.Having a technical issue? Use the Help button in the Settings menu of the Games app.Want to talk about Wordle or Spelling Bee? Check out Wordle Review and the Spelling Bee Forum.See our Tips and Tricks for more useful information on Connections.Join us here to solve Crosswords, The Mini, and other games by The New York Times. More

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel: ‘I Felt Lied To.’The journalist discusses his experience visiting Israel and the West Bank.EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”[MUSIC PLAYING]In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book “The Message,” he writes of a trip he took to Israel and the West Bank in May of 2023. The message is composed of four different essays. One is about a trip to Senegal. One is about a trip to a place where his book was banned. But it is the essay about Coates’s time in the West Bank the really anchors the collection.Coates, by virtue of who he is, cannot write a book about Israel and the Palestinians without it becoming a major media and even ideological event. But his own project, as he tells it, was to go to this place that he had grown up hearing about. This place that he had been told was too complicated for him to understand and to figure out what he thought of it, to take seriously what he would see. And what he saw shocked him.This book has been criticized for not being a whole picture, and it’s not a whole picture. There is much that is left out even on the Palestinian side that I think could be there, should be there. We talk about that. At the same time, when I went to the West Bank, what Coates saw is what I saw, too. Compared to other things you can read, think, Coates’s rendering of how Israel and Palestinians got here, I think it leaves a lot out. But his rendering of where here is, at least for Palestinians living in the places he visited, is a lot sharper and less clouded than most of what I’ve seen. As always, my email. [email protected] 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

With Mayor Eric Adams’s future in flux as he faces federal bribery charges, his challengers prepare for the possibility of an election before the June primary.With Mayor Eric Adams facing a five-count federal indictment and at least four Democratic primary challengers next year, the quarterly fund-raising reporting deadline on Friday carried heightened intrigue.Would Mr. Adams see a significant drop-off in donations? And of the candidates seeking to replace him, who would make the most of the mayor’s problems?The answers were only partially revealed on Friday, with Mr. Adams’s fund-raising disclosures not reported by the New York City Campaign Finance Board by day’s end.It was not clear if the mayor’s campaign filed disclosures at or past the deadline, or not at all. Vito Pitta, a compliance lawyer for the Adams campaign, did not respond to requests for comment.As for Mr. Adams’s Democratic rivals, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, claimed bragging rights by bringing his fund-raising total to just under a million dollars for his mayoral campaign so far. It was enough to potentially qualify him to receive $3.5 million in taxpayer money under the city’s matching funds program, which awards candidates $8 for every dollar up to the first $250 donated by a city resident.Mr. Lander said he was in a “strong position” to qualify for the maximum amount allowed in matching funds, enabling him to hit the $7.93 million spending cap for a primary or special election, should Mr. Adams resign or be forced out. Mr. Lander also raised the most money in the three-month reporting period that ended Oct. 7, collecting just over $315,000.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