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    America Wants a God

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    Today, we’re introducing “Believing,” a yearlong exploration from The Times on how we experience religion and spirituality now.Americans believe.Most people are wary of the government, the future and even each other, but they still believe in astonishing possibilities. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they have a spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world,” as we reported earlier this year.The country seems to be acknowledging this widespread spiritual hunger. America’s secularization is on pause, people have stopped leaving churches, and religion is taking a more prominent role in public life — in the White House, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even at Harvard. It’s a major, generational shift. But what does this actually look like in people’s lives?I have spent the past year reporting “Believing,” a new project for The Times. This project is personal to me. I was raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas. I’ve left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I understand how wrestling with belief can define a life. I hoped to capture what that journey looked like for others, too — both inside and outside of religion. I interviewed hundreds of people, visited dozens of houses of worship and asked Times readers for their stories. More than 4,000 responded.In my reporting, I found that there are many reasons for this shift in American life. Researchers say the pandemic and the country’s limited social safety nets have inclined people to stick with (or even turn to) religion for support. But there is another reason, too: Many Americans are dissatisfied with the alternatives to religion. They feel an existential malaise, and they’re looking for help. People want stronger communities, more meaningful rituals and spaces to express their spirituality. They’re also longing to have richer, more nuanced conversations about belief.Unsatisfying alternativesIris LegendreOver the past few decades, around 40 million Americans left churches, and the number of people who say they have no religion grew to about 30 percent of the country.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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      Are Easter Baskets Getting Out of Hand?

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      Social media feeds are awash in images of lavish baskets overflowing with expensive gifts. Some parents are giving their children bikes. Others are pushing back.“Is it even Easter if you don’t get a new bike?”So asks Judy Newton, a mother of three in Philadelphia, in a recent video on TikTok.In the weeks before Easter this Sunday, social media feeds have been full of videos of parents filling baskets with more than just the usual marshmallow Peeps. Instead, they are packing blankets, stuffed animals, shoes and knickknacks into large wicker baskets, tote bags or plastic buckets. And, yes, they are also giving bikes.“When you see some people post their videos on social media, it looks like Christmas morning,” Ms. Newton said. “Now these kids are getting that for Easter.”Baskets have, of course, long been associated with Easter. But in the age of influencer-driven consumption, Easter has been joined by Halloween (“boo baskets”), Christmas (“brr baskets”), Valentine’s Day and virtually every other holiday (“Leprechaun baskets” for St. Patrick’s Day) as social media encourages people to celebrate by spending lavishly.The Easter Bunny can hardly keep up.

      @kendra.crabtree Easter basket for girls!!! 🫶🏼💕 #easter #easterbasket #easterbasketideas #easter2025 #resurection #jesusisthereason #girlmom #fostermom #girls #spoiled ♬ original sound – KENDRA CRABTREE “Every holiday now, we make baskets,” said Talia Stenson, a mother and social media content creator in Sacramento. “And I think as the years have gone on, people just go above and beyond with these baskets, and now they’re almost a little too overboard.”

      @haileyjoor #easterbasket #easter2025 #boymom #basket #toddlermom #sahm ♬ original sound – mw🎧🧡 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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      Understanding A.D.H.D.

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      What’s behind the surge in cases in the U.S.?This morning, my colleagues at The Times Magazine published a remarkable cover story by Paul Tough about a surge of A.D.H.D. cases in the United States — and the way we treat them. Today, 23 percent of 17-year-old boys have received a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The number of prescriptions rose nearly 60 percent in a decade. You almost certainly know people who take these stimulants.Why is this happening? One thing I love about Paul’s story is that it’s partly a tale about how science is made and changed. Researchers in the 1930s saw immediate benefits when they treated jumpy kids with amphetamines. Eventually, doctors crafted a diagnosis that could explain distracted and excitable personalities, and a consensus formed about how to treat them. Paul’s story describes how a few scientists have come to challenge that consensus — and some of the fundamental ideas behind A.D.H.D.For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Paul about his reporting.What got you interested in this story?I’ve been writing for decades about education and children, and I now have two boys of my own. A few years ago, I began to notice how many families I met were struggling with their kids’ attention issues. Attention was something I worried about in my own children — and in myself, too. But I didn’t know much about the science behind attention. So I started talking to scientists. When I did, I discovered they had a lot of big unresolved questions.What is A.D.H.D., and why is it so tricky to define?There is no biological test for A.D.H.D. So it has to be diagnosed by its symptoms, and those symptoms are sometimes hard to pin down. One patient’s behavior can look quite different from another’s, and certain A.D.H.D. symptoms can also be signs of other things — depression or childhood trauma or autism. Take a child who is constantly distracted by her anxiety. Does she have A.D.H.D., an anxiety disorder or both?So A.D.H.D. may not be a clear, distinct medical disorder with defined boundaries — something you either have or don’t have?Increasingly, the science shows that the condition exists on a continuum, and there is no clear dividing line between people who have A.D.H.D. and people who don’t. For many kids, A.D.H.D. symptoms fluctuate over time — worse one year, better the next — and those fluctuations may depend on their external environment as much as their internal wiring.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 Future of Baseball

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      An interview with the M.L.B. commissioner. A new baseball season is underway, and the sport is enjoying a sort of renaissance.Baseball is making more money than it ever has. The addition of a pitch clock has made games quicker and created more action on the field. Attendance and ratings are on the rise.But the sport also faces a possible long-term problem: the widening gap between its haves and have-nots.Baseball’s future, both good and bad, is on display in California.It’s a glorious moment for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won the World Series last year and have baseball’s biggest star, Shohei Ohtani. After winning the title, the Dodgers added even more talent to their roster — the team will spend well over $300 million this year on player salaries.A few hundred miles up Interstate 5, in Sacramento, that kind of money feels almost unfathomable. There the Athletics, who left Oakland after 57 years, are playing their home games at a minor-league ballpark as they prepare to move to Las Vegas in three years. The A’s entire payroll is only slightly more than what Ohtani alone is owed each year.Money doesn’t win games. It’s baseball, after all. And the A’s are scrappy. Even if they aren’t as well compensated, they can beat anyone on any given day. But the imbalance of resources, over time, tends to offer richer teams an advantage.For today’s newsletter, The Times spoke with the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, about the state of the game.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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      Take Better Care of Your Skin

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      Here’s some advice. The beauty industry has always preyed upon our insecurities: Try this lotion or potion to look (and thus be!) happier, healthier, prettier, younger. Savvy marketers use that vanity to convince us that we need products uniquely formulated for cold weather, warm weather, crow’s feet, undereye areas, lips, necks, scalps — and yes, even derrières.As a result, there have never been more skin care products out there. My family’s crowded bathroom counter is evidence of this, and my 15-year-old daughter is its driving force. Like many of her peers, she has developed a seemingly limitless appetite for all manner of beauty products. In fact, thanks to Gens Z and Alpha, global beauty sales are expected to reach $590 billion in 2028 (up from $466 billion in 2023).But, it turns out, a basic routine still reigns supreme. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what Wirecutter’s beauty team learned about skin care from months of research, testing and interviews with dermatologists. And I’ll share a simple regimen for healthier skin that won’t break your budget.Easy does itThat focus on simplicity is something we heard repeatedly during our reporting and testing.“Simple is good,” Dr. Neelam Vashi, a dermatologist in Boston, told us. “You really just want to have products that moisturize, rejuvenate and feel comfortable on your skin. There is no magic cream. The magic is just finding the routine and sticking to it.”The more extraneous goops you layer on, the more you risk irritating your skin — and the trickier it becomes to discern exactly which ingredient might have triggered a reaction.In general, products with short ingredient lists are preferable. And scan ingredient lists to check that your products have components targeting specific skin care concerns — sometimes called active ingredients.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 Price of a Show

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      Tickets for the hottest Broadway plays are now out of reach for many. There’s a starry production of “Othello” opening on Broadway tonight. And if you’re among the many people who really, really want to see Denzel Washington as a jealous general, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal as a scheming Iago, it’s going to cost you: Most of the center orchestra seats, as well as a few rows in the mezzanine, are being sold for $921 apiece.The high prices for this Shakespeare classic are setting records. During its second week of previews, “Othello” grossed more at the box office than any other nonmusical play had ever grossed on Broadway.Tickets for the hottest Broadway shows are now out of reach for many. And the same is true for other sought-after live events, such as pop concerts (which now cost hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per ticket) and big sports games. (A few weeks before the Super Bowl, the cheapest available tickets were reselling for more than the average monthly mortgage payment.)In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how Broadway seats became so eye-poppingly pricey.Trying to break evenProducing Broadway shows has become more expensive since the pandemic, and a vast majority of them lose money. So producers have been staging more short runs of plays with stars in lead roles — the stars attract ticket buyers, and the short runs allow those stars to more quickly return to filmmaking, which pays better than Broadway. Limited runs also seem to incentivize potential ticket buyers, because people find the now-or-never aspect motivating.There is, of course, a tension between profitability and accessibility. These prices are preventing some potential theatergoers from seeing high-profile productions of important work.Investors who spend money to bring shows to Broadway embrace high ticket prices because they want at least a shot at recouping their expenses. But many theater lovers, as they reminded me in a rollicking comments thread on the story I wrote about this subject last week, find these prices upsetting, because they want to see the shows they want to see at price points they consider reasonable.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 Rise of Women’s Basketball

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      Caitlin Clark helped push the sport to new highs. She didn’t do it alone. Attend, or even just watch, a women’s sports game these days and you’ll see the phrase splashed across the front of fans’ black T-shirts: “Everyone watches women’s sports.”At last year’s N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament, that idea seemed truer than ever. For the first time since the inception of the N.C.A.A. women’s championship in 1982, the women’s final drew more viewers than the men’s — 18.9 million compared with 14.8.N.C.A.A. basketball championship viewers, 1995–2024 More

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      Trend Overload

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      We cover a surprising form of Gen Z burnout. Consider yourself lucky if you have never heard of the “coastal grandmother aesthetic.”Or “blueberry milk nails,” or the “mob wife aesthetic” or a hundred other blink-and-you’ll-miss-them crazes that cycle online with the ferocity of a centrifuge. These microtrends, as they’re known, tend to be associated with Gen Z. But members of that generation say they are exhausted by the onslaught of faddish clothes and new phrases they encounter every time they pick up their phones.I’ve spent the last few months asking young people about the fashion and social media trends that are actually registering in their offline lives. More than any one trend, the teenagers and twentysomethings I spoke with wanted to talk about just how many trends there were, and how overwhelming it all felt.Every generation feels pressure to keep up with trends, especially in its youth. But many members of Gen Z seem to be under particular stress: The fire hose of social media offers endless opportunities to feel left out. Others say they just can’t afford — mentally or financially — to try to keep up.For a new story in The Times’s Style section, I talked to young people about the frenzied trend ecosystem — and what some of them were doing to escape it.Keeping upShort-form video platforms like TikTok are fertile territory for microtrends. They get a heavy assist from fast fashion companies like Temu and Shein that sell inexpensive but poorly made clothes and accessories, available in just a few clicks on the apps.On the first day of sixth grade, Neena Atkins noticed that several girls at her middle school wore scrunchies on their wrists. She searched for scrunchies on TikTok, and in the days that followed she was served dozens more videos in which the hair ties were being worn as bracelets.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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      Who’s Got Trump’s Ear on Tariffs? Lutnick or Navarro?

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      Corporate leaders and investors continue to be caught off guard by the president’s trade policy, especially as deal talks heat up. Looking for tariff relief? Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, appears to be one to call.Tierney L. Cross for The New York TimesWho’s in the room President Trump’s tariff policy has given corporate chiefs and investors a serious case of whiplash. While the markets cheered on Wednesday’s delay on auto sector levies, setting off an impressive late-day rally, the move also adds to the confusion about what comes next.The latest: There’s increasing buzz that agricultural products are next in line for tariff relief, as the president faces intense lobbying from his party. And the release on Wednesday of the Fed’s beige book survey of regional activity showed that companies were growing worried that the levies would push up prices.One school of thought on Trump’s tariff plans: they could level the field before negotiations. Trump himself sees them as a tool to bolster the U.S. economy.A way to think about this is to look at the people in his orbit. On tariffs, there are two key, and seemingly polar opposite, figures.There’s Howard Lutnick, the former head of Cantor Fitzgerald who is a moderate on trade and now commerce secretary. And there is Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump lieutenant and a proponent of high tariffs who is generally opposed to trade deals.Who has more influence? For now, it seems to be Lutnick. Trump’s announcement of a one-month pause on tariffs on cars coming through Canada and Mexico wouldn’t have surprised anyone who heard Lutnick’s comments earlier in the day.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