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      20/20 Foresight

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      We’re covering the strategic risks that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are taking.Once an election is over, hindsight can make the winner’s strategy look perfect and the loser’s seem doomed. As my colleague Jonathan Swan said recently on “The Daily”: “The winning campaign, everything they did was genius, and then the losing campaign are just a bunch of idiots. And the truth is that neither is necessarily true.”The truth instead tends to be that presidential campaigns make strategic decisions that come with benefits as well as costs. And those decisions aren’t guaranteed to succeed or fail.In today’s newsletter, I’ll analyze a core strategy that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have each pursued. After Tuesday, I suspect we will come to see both as crucial, albeit in different ways.Harris’s cautionOn paper, Harris is the underdog. In rich countries around the world, incumbents are doing badly; the ruling parties in Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan have all recently lost power. In the U.S., President Biden has a 40 percent approval rating, and less than 30 percent of adults are satisfied with the country’s direction.Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out that voters appear eager for change and specifically seem skeptical of progressivism. (I recommend his essay on the subject.)Given this backdrop, Harris has run a strikingly cautious campaign. Game theorists would describe it as a low-variance strategy. She and her aides avoided moves that might have gone very well — and might have gone very poorly.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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      A Classical Music Discovery

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      An unknown waltz by Chopin has been found. As The Times’s classical music reporter, I don’t often get “news” from long-dead composers.But I recently learned that an unknown waltz by the eminent composer Chopin, written nearly 200 years ago, had been discovered in the vault of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. It was unearthed in a collection of memorabilia, alongside postcards signed by Picasso and letters from Brahms and Tchaikovsky.We published our exclusive story on the discovery today. And here’s a special treat: The superstar pianist Lang Lang recorded the waltz for The Times. You can watch his performance here.The story of the long-lost waltz starts at the Morgan on a late-spring day, when the curator and composer Robinson McClellan came across an unusual musical manuscript. The piece was moody and melancholic, and a conspicuous name was written across the top: Chopin.McClellan took a photo on his iPhone so he could play the piece back at home on his electric piano. He also sent a photo to Jeffrey Kallberg, a Chopin scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.“My jaw dropped,” Kallberg told me. “I knew I had never seen this before.”In September, the Morgan’s experts invited me to view the manuscript, which they had authenticated by analyzing the paper, ink and musical style. It was much smaller than I had imagined — a pockmarked scrap about the size of an index card. Chopin had famously tiny penmanship, and he packed a lot into this little piece.As an amateur pianist, I grew up adoring Chopin’s music. His waltzes, nocturnes, ballades and mazurkas are a dreamy realm of nostalgia, longing, suffering and bliss. He is still one of music’s most beloved figures. (His heart, pickled in a jar of alcohol, is encased in a church in Warsaw.)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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      How Elections Affect Our Shopping

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      We explore why consumers tend to get skittish about major purchases ahead of a general election. In the weeks leading up to a general election, consumers tend to get skittish about major purchases like houses, cars, weddings and investments. After the election, regardless of the outcome, they open up their wallets and shop again.It’s the election shopping slump.As the presidential election draws near, my colleague Jordyn Holman and I wanted to see if the trend was holding true this year as well. In a new article that published this morning, we find that it is.Wedding planners told us that newly engaged couples were too distracted to book events for next year. Financial advisers said their clients were keeping their assets in cash. Car dealers said shoppers were staying on the sidelines.In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what drives this behavior, and why it’s not unique to this election cycle.The pivot pointThere are a lot of reasons Americans are reluctant to buy homes right now. Inflation drove mortgage interest rates to a 20-year high, and a lack of housing stock kept prices from falling, exacerbating an affordability crisis. But even in years when the housing market was more amenable, buyers got nervous before they went to the polls.Jonathan Miller, a real estate appraiser, looked back at two decades of home sales in Los Angeles, Manhattan and Miami and saw a pattern: Sales dipped in the second half of even years and bounced back in odd years. “Election Day is the pivot point,” he said. “It’s like the foot is taken off the brake after the election.”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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      Is the Trump Trade Back?

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      Market observers see signs that investors increasingly believe Donald Trump will win the election, but there may be alternate explanations for a shift in sentiment. A rally in some stocks, cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump’s social media company are some signs of investors betting on the former president to win in November.Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersA trade makes a comeback The election polls may be deadlocked. But in the markets, some investors are indicating that they see Donald Trump as increasingly likely to win the White House, a belief that seems to mirror a swing in the prediction markets.Market observers see the return of the so-called Trump trade, which posits that certain industry sectors and financial assets — think oil drillers and cryptocurrencies — would benefit from the former president bringing in lower taxes and less regulation.The signs that the Trump trade is gaining steam: Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire financier, told Bloomberg yesterday that over the past 12 days, markets appeared “very convinced Trump is going to win.” (It’s worth noting that Druckenmiller said he didn’t plan to vote for either candidate.)Among the evidence Druckenmiller pointed to:A rally in bank stocks, which are up 8.5 percent over the past two weeks. (That said, banks have so far reported better-than-expected earnings.)Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, the former president’s unprofitable social media company, have soared since late September, adding nearly $2 billion to its market value. But the stock’s volatile trading hasn’t always correlated with polls or prediction markets, and it’s unclear whether the company would draw more advertisers if Trump won. Some companies might flock to the platform to curry political favor; others might stay away.Bitcoin has risen about 13 percent in the past week. The cryptocurrency world has largely bet on a second Trump administration being friendlier to digital assets, though Vice President Kamala Harris has made appeals to the industry.Also, the dollar approached a two-and-a-half month high this morning as currency traders appear to be pricing in a Trump victory, betting that his economic policies would drive up inflation, lower the price of bonds and strengthen the dollar. (That said, Trump wants a weak greenback.)But there are potential pitfalls to betting on Trump. “It is a thing in the financial markets,” Holger Schmieding, the chief economist at Berenberg, a German bank, said of the Trump trade.He told DealBook: “I don’t agree with it in the long run. Higher tariffs and less immigration would hurt U.S. vitality.”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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      A Shift in the World of Science

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      What this year’s Nobels can teach us about science and humanity.Alan Burdick and Technology observers have grown increasingly vocal in recent years about the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the human variety. A.I. models can write and talk like us, draw and paint like us, crush us at chess and Go. They express an unnerving simulacrum of creativity, not least where the truth is concerned.A.I. is coming for science, too, as this week’s Nobel Prizes seemed keen to demonstrate. On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists who helped computers “learn” closer to the way the human brain does. A day later, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three researchers for using A.I. to invent new proteins and reveal the structure of existing ones — a problem that stumped biologists for decades, yet could be solved by A.I. in minutes.The Nobel Committee for Chemistry announced the winners last week.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCue the grousing: This was computer science, not physics or chemistry! Indeed, of the five laureates on Tuesday and Wednesday, arguably only one, the University of Washington biochemist David Baker, works in the field he was awarded in.The scientific Nobels tend to award concrete results over theories, empirical discovery over pure idea. But that schema didn’t quite hold this year, either. One prize went to scientists who leaned into physics as a foundation on which to build computer models used for no groundbreaking result in particular. The laureates on Wednesday, on the other hand, had created computer models that made big advancements in biochemistry.These were outstanding and fundamentally human accomplishments, to be sure. But the Nobel recognition underscored a chilling prospect: Henceforth, perhaps scientists will merely craft the tools that make the breakthroughs, rather than do the revolutionary work themselves or even understand how it came about. Artificial intelligence designs and builds hundreds of molecular Notre Dames and Hagia Sophias, and a researcher gets a pat for inventing the shovel.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 Robotic Future of Pro Sports

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      We explore a looming change in sports officiating. For most of sports history, there was no recourse when a referee made a bad call. Fans could boo and players could complain, but the game went on. Instant replay changed that a few decades ago, allowing coaches to challenge a call and ask the referees to review it. That made games fairer, but it also made them slower.Now, many professional sports are on the verge of a new technological breakthrough: automated referee systems, which get the call right every time and significantly reduce delays from reviews.Leagues insist that these systems, which they are testing in the minors or in preseason games, are not meant to eliminate officials. Umpires and referees are still necessary to make nuanced calls — checked swings in baseball, charging in basketball, pass interference in football. But the leagues believe automated systems could make games both fairer and faster.In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what this technology can do as well as the concerns that some league officials have about it.Referees check an instant replay during an N.F.L. game. Adam Hunger/Associated PressState of the toolsTechnology is built into the rules of professional sports. The N.F.L. requires instant-replay reviews of all scoring plays and turnovers to ensure that the calls are right.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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      Inside the Sally Rooney Fan Base

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      We explore some of the most passionate fans in literature.On Wednesday, a crowd of mostly young women, many carrying bookstore tote bags, filled a venue on the bank of the River Thames. They — we — were there to hear the Irish novelist Sally Rooney discuss “Intermezzo,” her latest novel.Rooney is a literary star, and each new release is a highly anticipated and heavily marketed cultural event. Fans attend midnight release parties. The lucky few who get advance copies wield them as status symbols on social media. “I did post the book,” a 26-year-old Rooney fan told me. “Everyone knows I’m obsessed with her.”Rooney’s writing embodies a kind of cool that feels of the moment. Her style is unforced, spare and incisive — the literary equivalent of Gen Z’s habit of omitting capital letters from text messages, or the doe-eyed, bored poses of influencers on Instagram. “If writing is almost too effusive, too emotional, it becomes a bit cliché,” another fan told me. “I think her writing feels really fresh because it’s pared back.”The simplicity of Rooney’s language is part of its power. Her most emotionally resonant sentences have word counts in the single digits, and they arise in mundane situations. “Normal People,” Rooney’s second novel, is about two young people, Connell and Marianne, who are negotiating their relationship, with its various power imbalances, while feeling out their place in the world. I think about this scene a lot:“She smiled, rubbed at her nose. He unzipped his black puffer jacket and put it over her shoulders. They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.”Many of the Rooney fans I spoke with at the book talk on Wednesday — all in their late 20s — praised the emotional truth of her writing. “I couldn’t believe that somebody had written something that I related to so much,” a fan said of “Normal People.” Rooney’s books deal in the fraught business of interpersonal relationships — the difficulty of vulnerability, miscommunication, understanding one’s own power over another. At an “Intermezzo” midnight release party in Brooklyn.Ye Fan for The New York TimesHer characters often consider their political and social context, what it means to be young and to be in love right now, at a time when connection can be difficult and things appear to be falling apart. In Rooney’s third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” the character Alice writes to her best friend, Eileen:“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?”At the event, I found myself thinking about Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour, which I attended a couple of weeks ago. There are, of course, considerable differences between Rooney and Swift. Yet their fan bases are demographically similar — there is certainly overlap — and they share a desire to see themselves in their idol’s work. I thought, then, about how few avenues Rooney’s fans, as opposed to Swift’s, had to connect to her. A key part of Swift’s appeal is her willingness to narrate her life as it happens. She courts her fans’ investment not only in her work but in herself. Swift is an active participant in her celebrity. 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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      An Escape from the Front Line in Ukraine

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      An excerpt from one of the most ambitious stories in The Times Magazine’s history.Today, The New York Times Magazine published one of the most ambitious stories in its long history — an account of a Russian military officer’s desertion and escape. Sarah Topol spent over a year and a half investigating the Russian military and reporting in eight countries across four continents.In the story, the officer — identified by a pseudonym, Ivan — feigns a serious back injury to escape the front in Ukraine and eventually defect. He uses a cane to make that story convincing. Now, he must retrieve his passport, which is locked with other officers’ passports in the H.R. office of his base in Russia. Each passport has a paper slip in it, logging various personal details. He buys a fake version of the passport online: good enough to fool the military, but not to fool anyone at the borders he needs to cross.So Ivan devises a plan to get his hands on the real one — and swap it with the fake. Here’s how he does it.Ivan knew the office from years of worthless paperwork and reports. The H.R. manager sat at a desk on the right side of the room. Next to him was a six-foot-high metal safe with three drawers. They were unlocked with a key. The passports were kept in folders inside the drawers.To complicate matters, Ivan could use only one arm — the other would be holding the cane as part of his act. So he had to walk in, with his cane in his left hand, take the passport out of his pocket and somehow swap it for the fake. He would also need to remove the paper slip from the original and place it into the duplicate before returning it. How could he do all that with just one hand?The H.R. manager’s desk faced the room. Ivan would have to find a way to reach into his pocket while holding both the cane and the passport. No, that wouldn’t work. He would need to find a way to sit down, put down his cane so he could have two free hands and then reach into his pocket — but that motion could be seen from the side or the back.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