Good morning. I’m Sam Sifton, your new host of The Morning. Before we get to the news today, I’d like to tell you a little about myself. You ought to know who’s writing to you.
Meet your news friendI’m a child of New York City. I grew up reading The Times in Brooklyn, where I paged through the print newspaper every morning, starting with the weather page and its agate-type listings of temperatures in cities around the world, then moving on to news, to arts coverage, to obituaries and sports. (I flipped through tabloid newspapers on the subway to school. No phones then to distract!) It made me into a news omnivore, someone who delights in finding bits of deliciousness and surprise in the journalism I inhale. (I suspect that may describe you as well.) It made me a lifelong news evangelist, too, someone who loves sharing what he’s found — first with my family and classmates, later with friends and colleagues, later still with readers. So when the chance arose to do that with a large and passionate audience (that’s you again), I pounced. It’s why I’m here — that same little kid, now working at scale. Here’s the program. On weekdays, I’ll write you a letter about the news, telling you what’s going on in the world. I’ll try to guide you through it. The idea is to let you know what’s happening — to give you the confidence each morning that by the time you’re finished, you’ll know enough to navigate the day, to fit your life into the broader currents shaping the world and the culture. We hope this means you’ll never be caught off guard by conversations happening in the coffee shop or outside in the hall before the meeting gets started. By opening The Morning each day, I hope you’ll end up with something smart, even pithy, to add to those conversations. Newsletters aren’t new to me. For more than a decade, I wrote The Times’s “What to Cook” newsletter, for Cooking, bridging the divide between our recipes and the world in which we cook them.
I wrote about chicken shawarma, yes, but also about the reality that attends making chicken shawarma in times of deep national and international conflict — during the pandemic, during storms, against the backdrop of terrible events. I wrote about art and novels and music, too, because those are things we talk about when we eat — and because we are human, even as we await election results and endure heat waves and worry endlessly about what’s happening in the world. News isn’t new to me, either. I’ve been at The Times since 2002. I’ve worked, as they say, all over the room. I’ve been the Culture editor, responsible for our arts coverage. I was the restaurant critic (what a gig — foie gras again?). I was the National editor during the Boston Marathon bombing and the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. In 2020, I started overseeing all our culture and lifestyle news and criticism. (My editor grilled me about my life, habits and interests here, so you can get to know me a little better.) Along the way I fell in love with the eccentricities and energy of The Times, with the boundless curiosity of its people. And I’ll write about that, too. I’ll introduce you to the work of my colleagues — to their breaking news reports, their months-in-the-making investigations and their probing criticism. I’ll ask them questions, yours and mine. I’ll show you how their stories illuminate the way humans relate to one another, and how they bring the people and places they’re writing about to life. I’ll write about the studies they’re interested in, about the games they build, about the new forms of journalism they’re developing. I’ll tell you about the things they’ve found out that powerful people don’t want you to know. And, look, honestly? There’ll probably be some fishing stuff as well, some stories about the snowy owl I saw in a field, a few asides about broken things fixed with wrenches and luck. News, after all, happens against the backdrop of the living world, of the reality of a wheezing refrigerator that needs a new part. That’s as true for journalists as it is for the people who learn from their work. So I’ll tell you about that, too. We’re all in this together. I hope you’ll let me know how it goes. I’m at themorning@nytimes.com. I’ll read every letter sent. Now, let’s get you caught up.
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MaryBeth Lewis loves kids. She gave birth to her 13th at age 62. And no medical mishaps, miscarriages or raised eyebrows were going to stop her from having one more. Two, actually. But to bring this last set of twins into the world, Lewis had to defy the law. She could push her own body only so far, and her husband wouldn’t co-sign on a surrogate pregnancy. So she lined up donor sperm, donor eggs and a surrogate mother — by repeatedly forging her husband’s signature. Those double dealings (and a few more) left Lewis, now 68, potentially facing a yearslong prison sentence on 30 criminal counts. She lost her job and is barred from her children’s school. She dropped nearly 70 pounds from stress and spent more than $500,000 fighting for her freedom and for custody of the twins, who she maintains are her 14th and 15th children. “I felt bad, definitely,” she admitted. But all those criminal charges? They were “bullcrap,” she said. Her determination to expand her family ultimately led to a court battle for the ages. Read about it in this week’s Times Magazine.
A progressive Senate candidate in Maine, Graham Platner, said he unknowingly got an obscure Nazi tattoo. Should that be disqualifying? Yes. Platner’s tattoo, as well as some of his past statements, indicate a history of faulty judgment. “We can do better, and we should,” Brian Kresge writes for Bangor Daily News. No. It’s to be expected that rookie candidates will have baggage. “He is the antithesis of the kind of spit-shined, hothouse Democrat favored by the establishment. And voters like that,” Bloomberg’s Nia-Malika Henderson writes.
The Supreme Court gave Trump the immunity to leverage the Justice Department against his political opponents. It should take it away, Mary McCord and Andrew Weissmann write. Women don’t necessarily need remote work or flexible work schedules. They need boundaries that prevent their jobs from asking for their time outside work hours, Corinne Low argues. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the Democratic Party and Maureen Dowd on male friendship. Watch today’s stories, free in the app. The new Watch tab brings you closer to the story with videos across news and culture. Watch free in the app.
Heidi Klum’s Halloween: The supermodel dressed up as Medusa. Step inside her party. “Please look after this bear”: Paddington is coming to London’s West End. Rare bird: Passionate birders flocked to New York to glimpse a common cuckoo making a very uncommon appearance in the U.S. A crisis of care: Many developed countries have a lot of immigrant caregivers for their older adults. In Italy, some of those workers are struggling with serious mental health problems. Hip-hop: Marcyliena Morgan’s idea to open an archive of hip-hop music and culture at Harvard University helped establish rap as a course of serious study on a par with classical music. She died at 75.
M.L.B.: The Dodgers’ 11th-inning victory over the Blue Jays makes them the first repeat World Series winners in 25 years. The Japanese pitching phenom Yoshinobu Yamamoto won World Series M.V.P. College football: The No. 18 Oklahoma beat the No. 14 Tennessee 33-27 in what was essentially a College Football Playoff elimination game. The Sooners defense and kicker came up big to put the Volunteers away.
“Book of Lives,” by Margaret Atwood: The subtitle of Atwood’s latest book says it all: “A Memoir of Sorts.” This is not a traditional autobiography. Yes, Atwood follows a chronological path: girlhood to university years to early publications and so on. “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book,” she writes. “Dead boring.” But she peppers the narrative with so many details, digressions, photos, snippets of poetry and score settlings that her memoir reads like a decadent bacchanal. No velvet ropes here; Atwood flings open the doors of her life, connecting memories to the books they inspired. “Wrong turnings, crinolines, abandoned plots, nylons with seams, canoes, lost loves,” she writes. “It’s all material.” More on books
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