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      Talking While Black

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      On This Week’s Episode:Think back to the summer of 2020, when a series of violent, highly publicized killings of Black Americans led to outrage and a national movement to eradicate racism and its evils. That movement gave way to a backlash that’s playing out in schools, businesses and the federal government. The pushback has only intensified since Donald J. Trump returned to office.In this episode, we look at stories about Black people who found themselves caught in the middle of the country’s shift away from diversity, equity and inclusion.Illustration by Trevor Davis; Photos from 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

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      Trump Fired, Then Unfired, National Nuclear Security Administration Employees. What Were Their Jobs?

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      When termination letters were sent to employees across the federal government last week, the Trump administration affected an agency charged with the readiness of America’s nuclear arsenal.The move also shined a spotlight on the agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which few Americans likely think of often, if ever, but has a monumental responsibility.Here’s a rundown of what the obscure agency does and the potential reasons that the Trump administration had to quickly adjust some of the firings:What is the agency’s mission?The National Nuclear Security Administration maintains, refurbishes and keeps safe the United States’ more than 3,000 nuclear warheads. It also supervises the production of new nuclear warheads. It has a $25 billion annual budget and more than 57,000 employees. Congress also put the agency in charge of thwarting nuclear proliferation, researching and developing nuclear propulsion systems for submarines and directing national laboratories that provide key scientific and engineering knowledge for the U.S. nuclear weapons system.Those laboratories include the historical Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the top secret Manhattan Project took place during World War II.To what department does it belong?Confusingly, despite its long-held, pivotal role in the military’s defense strategy, the agency sits within the Department of Energy, rather than the Department of Defense.In 2017, after accepting the offer to serve as energy secretary in the first Trump administration, Rick Perry was bewildered that the job entailed supervising the maintenance and production of the most fearsome weapons in the world.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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      NYT Crossword Answers for Feb. 17, 2025

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      Kate Hawkins and Erica Hsiung Wojcik make their collaboration debut.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesMONDAY PUZZLE — Before we begin our weeks and dig into the day’s puzzle, I’d like us all to pause for a moment of communal self-care. Please join me in gazing at this column’s header image of wild piglets sleeping in a stripy little pile and feel its curative effects wash over you.If that seems like too saccharine a sentiment, consider it compensation for the biting wit in today’s crossword theme, which Kate Hawkins and Erica Hsiung Wojcik have woven into an otherwise guileless and beginner-friendly puzzle. Don’t feel guilty for enjoying the acerbic tone therein — we can have a little snark, as a treat.Today’s ThemeA sarcastic phrase akin to [“Uh-huh, I bet”] is YEAH, RIGHT. The circled letters in 17-, 24-, 36- and 50-Across reveal what this phrase describes, in a literal sense: words synonymous with “yeah” hidden in the right side of their entries.The [Memento-filled craft project] at 17-Across is a SCRAPBOOK, with OK at the end. At 24-Across, the [Fast-food chain that serves Louisiana chicken] is POPEYES, which ends with YES. And so on and so forth.I appreciate a cute and uncomplicated theme like this one to start my week. It elicited a chuckle, which is all we can hope for sometimes.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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      BAFTA Awards Winners: ‘Conclave,’ ‘Anora’ and ‘The Brutalist’ Take Home Top Prizes

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      “Anora” and “The Brutalist” also took home major prizes at the British equivalent of the Oscars, tipping the scales again.“Conclave” won the best movie title at the EE British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday — adding the latest twist to a chaotic awards season in which no one movie has dominated the major ceremonies.The film, which stars Ralph Fiennes and was directed by Edward Berger, is a thriller about the selection of a new pope. It took home four awards on Sunday at Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, commonly known as the BAFTAs. The other three prizes were in minor categories: best editing, best adapted screenplay and outstanding British film.In securing the best film award, “Conclave” beat Sean Baker’s “Anora,” a dramedy in which an exotic dancer marries the son of a Russian oligarch, and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” about a Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) rebuilding his life in the United States after the Holocaust.It also triumphed over the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and “Emilia Pérez.”“Conclave” hadn’t previously featured among the major winners this awards season. It only secured one Golden Globe, for best screenplay, at a ceremony in which “Emilia Pérez” and “The Brutalist” were the big winners. More recently, the momentum for the best picture Oscar had swung to “Anora,” after that movie picked up major honors at this year’s Critic’s Choice ceremony and the Directors Guild of America and Producers Guild of America awards.Yet the prominence of “Conclave” at the BAFTAs will give the movie momentum going into this year’s Academy Awards, scheduled for March 2. There is significant overlap between the voting bodies for both awards, and the BAFTAs and Oscars regularly have the same winners.The cast and crew of “Conclave” looked stunned when the best film prize was announced. Isabella Rossellini, who plays a nun in the movie, stood onstage smiling gleefully throughout Berger’s acceptance speech, in which he said he was “deeply humbled” to see his film receive the honor.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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      First Test of Trump’s Power to Fire Officials Reaches Supreme Court

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      In the first case to reach the Supreme Court arising from the blitz of actions taken in the early weeks of the new administration, lawyers for President Trump asked the justices on Sunday to let him fire a government lawyer who leads a watchdog agency.The administration’s emergency application asked the court to vacate a federal trial judge’s order temporarily reinstating Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel. Mr. Dellinger leads an independent agency charged with safeguarding government whistle-blowers and enforcing certain ethics laws. The position is unrelated to special counsels appointed by the Justice Department.“This court should not allow lower courts to seize executive power by dictating to the president how long he must continue employing an agency head against his will,” the administration’s filing said.The court is expected to act in the coming days.The filing amounts to a challenge to a foundational precedent that said Congress can limit the president’s power to fire leaders of independent agencies, a critical issue as Mr. Trump seeks to reshape the federal government through summary terminations.Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, leads an independent agency charged with safeguarding government whistle-blowers and enforcing certain ethics laws. U.S. Office of Special CounselThe statute that created the job now filled by Mr. Dellinger, who was confirmed by the Senate in 2024, provides for a five-year term and says the special counsel “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” But a one-sentence email to Mr. Dellinger on Feb. 7 gave no reasons for terminating him, effective immediately.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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      Ron Travisano, Adman Behind Singing Cats and Joe Isuzu, Dies at 86

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      The art director for Meow Mix and other memorable commercials, he began his career at the dawn of a creative revolution on Madison Avenue.In the early 1970s, the madcap advertising executives Ron Travisano and Jerry Della Femina were struggling to find a gimmick to sell an undistinguished brand of pet food.Watching interminable and unremarkable footage of cats eating, Mr. Travisano and an editor, Joe Lione, spotted one that kept opening and closing its mouth in a manner that appeared to simulate singing.In fact, the cat was choking on its food. But in an eye-of-the-beholder eureka moment, the admen were inspired to create the classic singing-cat commercial that put Meow Mix on the map.The original commercial for Meow Mix won a Clio Award.Della Femina AdvertisingThe endearing “Meow, meow, meow, meow” commercial for Ralston Purina — accompanied by the tagline “The cat food that cats ask for by name,” written by Mr. Travisano’s collaborators Neil Drossman and Bob Kuperman, who also came up with the name Meow Mix — won a Clio and other industry awards. Nearly two decades after the ad debuted, The Times described it as having “one of the best known, most readily sung commercial jingles.” (The insistent meowing, mouthed by the singer Linda November, was presumably less endearing when played repeatedly to torture terrorism suspects at the U.S. prison compound at Guantánamo Bay.)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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      M23 Rebels in Congo Say They Have Entered Bukavu

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      Last month, M23 rebels backed by Rwanda took the city of Goma in a bloody battle. This weekend, the group entered the gold-trading center of Bukavu in eastern Congo after government soldiers fled.Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday entered the vital trading hub of Bukavu in the east of the country, according to the fighters and videos circulated by local residents. If confirmed, Bukavu would be the latest city to fall in a sweeping offensive that has revealed the weakness of the crumbling Congolese army.The M23 rebels — who are supported and directed by Rwanda, Congo’s much smaller neighbor — appeared to meet no resistance, residents said, as they marched into Bukavu, a provincial capital that is a major center for gold trading and smuggling.“We’re there, we’re there in Bukavu,” said Willy Ngoma, a M23 spokesman reached by telephone.On Sunday, the rebels addressed a crowd of people in Bukavu’s main square after they entered the city in long, silent columns, according to three eyewitnesses and videos shared on social media and verified by the Times. The eyewitnesses requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the armed group.Days earlier, Congolese soldiers had fled the city in similar columns, according to a dozen other residents, leaving Bukavu under no clear leadership and in the hands of looters who broke into warehouses and shops. The Congolese government has not spoken publicly about the situation in the city Sunday, and the capture of Bukavu has not been independently confirmed.The apparent fall of Bukavu would stand in sharp contrast to the protracted battle for the key city of Goma last month, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed, according to the United Nations.With the capture of Bukavu, a city of more than a million people that sits on the edge of a crystalline lake, the M23 rebels would now control the two largest trading hubs in Congo’s mineral-rich east.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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      The MAGA Youth Remind Me of the 1980s and Not In a Good Way

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      When I was 7, I sent a birthday card to President Ronald Reagan. It was the 1980s. I lived in rural Alabama, and pretty much all the adults around me were loudly on board with what was then the Reagan revolution, which had swept Jimmy Carter and his timid liberal apologists for America’s greatness out of power and made the presidency, especially to my young eyes, a glamorous exemplar of everything good about the country. I remember the seductive appeal of the story he told about America as a global superpower, a “shining city on a hill” where anyone could be successful with enough elbow grease, so long as those meddlesome big-government liberals didn’t get in the way.Being young and preppy and rich back then looked cool to me. Within a few years I had a crush on Alex P. Keaton on “Family Ties,” who horrified his ex-hippie parents with his love of heartless capitalism and harebrained business schemes. I didn’t see that the show was making fun of him, too. The young conservatives of the ’80s were all molded in his image (and he in theirs).Now, in 2025, some young people (who were not yet born in the age of Reagan) are renouncing the progressive politics of their millennial elders and acting like it’s the ’80s again. There was a marked shift toward Donald Trump by voters under 30 according to exit polling in last November’s election, so maybe they are just dressing the part. But when I read about a group of younger MAGA supporters reveling in their victory at the member’s only Centurion New York (declaring, as one 27-year-old in attendance did, that Trump “is making it sexy to be Republican again. He’s making it glamorous to be a Republican again”) or see photos or watch videos of MAGA youth at, say, Turning Point USA events run by Charlie Kirk, a preppy right-wing influencer whose organization recruits high schoolers and college students to be soldiers in the culture war, or in Brock Colyar’s New York magazine cover story about the young right-wing elite at various inauguration parties — I get a very distinct feeling of déjà vu. It’s laced with nostalgia but grounded in dread.These young right-wingers have a slightly modernized late ’80s look. I doubt they use Aqua Net or Drakkar Noir, but I imagine their parties have the feel of a Brat Pack movie where almost everyone is or aspires to be a WASPy James Spader villain. Few of the people I’m talking about were even alive in the 1980s, and so they can’t understand what it means for Mr. Trump to be so stuck in that time, still fighting its battles. Now, instead of renouncing hippie counterculture, they’ve turned against whatever their generation considers to be woke. The incumbent liberal they detested was Joe Biden instead of Jimmy Carter. Instead of junk bonds, many of them plan to get rich by investing in crypto and trust that this administration will pursue or exceed Reagan levels of deregulation to facilitate it. After all, Project 2025 mentions Reagan 71 times.Mr. Trump’s ’80s were, until now, his glory years, when he built Trump Tower, published “The Art of the Deal” and called the tabloids on himself using a made-up name, John Barron. He was routinely flattered in the tabloids thanks to the excellent public relations skills of Mr. Barron, popped up regularly on TV and wrestling promotions and started making movie cameos. Urban elites looked down on him — Spy magazine called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” — but he embodied what many people who weren’t rich thought rich people looked like, lived like, and, in his shamelessness and selfishness, acted like.More important for us now, his formative understanding of politics seems to have been shaped by that era, when America, humbled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, crime and the oil crisis, was stuck with a cardigan-wearing president who suggested that we all turn down our thermostats for the collective good. Reagan told us to turn the thermostat way up, live large and swagger again. Hippies became yuppies, at least in the media’s imagination.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