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New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Can Embracing Punk Save Gen Z — and Our Flailing Country?
The writer and performer John Cameron Mitchell has a message for members of Generation Z: Stop playing it safe and embrace punk. Mitchell, who wrote 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch,' sits down with Opinion's deputy editorial director of culture, Carl Swanson, to talk about what he learned touring around the country and talking with college students about rebellion. Below is a transcript of an episode of 'The Opinions.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Please note: parts of this conversation contain strong language. Carl Swanson: My name is Carl Swanson, and I'm the deputy editorial director for culture at Times Opinion. We are only four months into the second Trump administration, so it's too early to say what the cultural response will be, but it's not too early to ask the question: What should the response be from art, music and from youth culture? The actor, writer and director John Cameron Mitchell recently wrote an essay for us with an answer to that question: 'Today's Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Two Opinion Columnists on Trump's Era of International Bullying
With President Trump meeting with heads of state in the Middle East this week, the Times Opinion senior international editor Krista Mahr sat down with the columnists Lydia Polgreen and Nick Kristof to talk about how the president is emboldening leaders of all kinds worldwide, and what relationships they're most worried about. Below is a transcript of an episode of 'The Opinions.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Krista Mahr: My name is Krista Mahr. I'm the senior international editor at Times Opinion. One of the things my colleagues and I have been watching closely in the first four months of Trump's second term is how world leaders are reacting to this new administration. I wanted to talk about this so-called Trump effect with Lydia Polgreen and Nick Kristof, columnists who have reported extensively on America's relationship with the rest of the world. Lydia, Nick, welcome. Lydia Polgreen: Hi, Nick. Hi, Krista. Nicholas Kristof: Good to be with you. Mahr: So, from my perspective, it looks like there are a few different types of leadership that have emerged in response to Trump 2.0. There are the emboldened leaders like Vladimir Putin who are using Trump's foreign policy to advance their own agendas. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why These Five Broadway Shows Are Inspiring for America Right Now
If you're lucky, you have something in your life that gives you purpose, and you have people in your life to talk to about it. Purpose gives me focus; it helps me not get distracted by the hour-to-hour tumult and chaos of the world, and it gives me gratitude for what I'm doing and what I have in my life. When I feel that gratitude slipping from me — when I feel restless, irritable or frustrated — it's usually because my sense of purpose is slipping for some reason, too. I've been thinking about this because, after Times Opinion's coverage last week of President Trump's first 100 days in office, I heard from readers and podcast listeners grappling with this moment and ways to live through it and remain intact. And I thought about the inspiration I drew this year from a favorite source of mine: plays and musicals on Broadway that dealt with purpose in different ways. These shows delve into dismay and disappointment in the world, and their characters' determination to make things better or happier. They are misfits and outsiders trying to break free of their own private frustrations: the high school student Shelby in the play 'John Proctor Is the Villain,' who wants to transcend men who have used or abused her; the helper-robot Oliver in 'Maybe Happy Ending,' who wants to reconnect with his old owner; the school board member Suzanne in 'Eureka Day,' who wants the community to flourish as long her values dominate; and Mary Todd Lincoln in 'Oh, Mary!' who just wants a moment back in the spotlight. These characters stayed with me because they were driven by clear intention and a hunger for life and vitality; their performers — Sadie Sink, Darren Criss, Jessica Hecht and Cole Escola — were knockouts in my book because they understood and ultimately delivered on that sense of purpose. All four, along with their shows, were nominated for Tony Awards on Thursday. But my favorite Broadway show of the season, just narrowly ahead of 'John Proctor,' was the aptly named 'Purpose,' by the great playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. At the risk of being too on-the-nose, if you want to think about purpose, see 'Purpose.' In the tradition of the plays 'August: Osage County,' 'The Piano Lesson' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' the play concerns a few days in the life of a sprawling American family that's awash in a reckoning over betrayal, mendacity, inheritance (literal and figurative) and what people are called to do. There is a lovely scene toward the end of 'Purpose' — no real spoilers — where the patriarch of the family, a character who calls to mind Jesse Jackson, talks about tending to the civil rights movement long ago and tending to bees now, late in his life. 'Honey never, ever spoils — did you know that?' Solomon Jasper says to his younger son, Naz. 'And bees just … make that. And to think that I could, in some small way, participate in the miracle of honey, a sweetness everlasting. It gave me … purpose. Yes. A small sense of purpose. Which was always something I needed. Because without it there is just despair. There is just emptiness. You've heard me say it a thousand times, but the movement was … there was such an extraordinary sense of God's presence then — everywhere you looked. Purpose. And we felt as organized as a hive. Everybody knew their role, knew their potential, that common goal and how to achieve it — and we were all walking through the world just glowing with God. And when that world began to change … there was nothing like it, no feeling like it. The vision of the better place we all carried with us — it was coming true.' More than anything, 'Purpose' challenges you to think about the life course that we find ourselves on, or that we chose, and whether it's right for us and whether it's enough. What happens when we lose our sense of purpose so much that we are no longer intact — as humans, as a family, as America? It's a play that meets our national moment.
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
One Moment That Foretold It All
Times Opinion asked our columnists to reflect on key moments during President Trump's first 100 days that were revealing about the administration or that reshaped the country. Read Ezra's Klein's essay below and the others here. I'm going to break the boundaries of the prompt and say that the most important — or at least most predictive — day of Donald Trump's second term came before it even began: It was July 15, 2024, the day he announced that JD Vance was his choice for vice president. The runner-ups were Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum — representatives of the Republican Party that existed before Trump's 2016 campaign, choices Trump might have made to reassure voters who doubted or feared him. Vance was of the MAGA movement in a way Rubio and Burgum were not. Vance hated all the right people. Rubio and Burgum were seen as moderating forces; Vance pitched himself as an accelerationist who believed the biggest problem with Trump's first term was that Trump was surrounded by people who, occasionally, said no to him. Vance was the only one of the three vice presidential contenders to say he would have done what Mike Pence would not: refuse to certify the 2020 election result. There was little sense, in the days before Trump's pick, that Vance held the pole position. Later reporting revealed a lobbying campaign: Rupert Murdoch and his allies tried to talk Trump out of Vance, as did Ken Griffin, the chief executive of Citadel, and even Kellyanne Conway. But Trump was swayed by other voices: Don Jr., Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, who reportedly told Trump that if he picked Rubio or Burgum he was likelier to be assassinated by MAGA's enemies. This was the moment we could see the structure of Trump's first term giving way to the structure of his second. Trump's first administration was almost like a European coalition government: Trump governed in an uneasy alliance with a Republican Party he did not fully control or even like, with a business community in which many viewed him as a buffoon, with a staff that saw part of its role as curbing and containing the boss's most destructive impulses, atop an administrative state that often resisted his demands. That friction frustrated Trump and many of his first-term allies. It was also why the most dire predictions for his first term largely did not come true and why so many wrongly predicted that his second term would follow the same script. But Trump's second term was never going to follow the same script because it has a completely different structure. This isn't a coalition government; it's a royal court. Trump is surrounded by courtiers who wield influence so long as they maintain his favor and not a moment longer. When is the last time he heard the word 'no,' or was told, 'I'm sorry, sir, you can't'? In his first term, Trump either sought or was steered toward advisers and appointments that would reassure many of his doubters; in his second, he has prized loyalists who will do what they're told and enforcers who will ensure that others fall in line as well. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Health
- New York Times
A Great Leap Forward for American Fathers
I spent the early days of Covid talking to hundreds of American parents of all different backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses and circumstances about how the pandemic affected their lives. While the overall picture was raw and depressing, there was often a glimmer of positivity: Many moms and dads felt lucky to be spending more time with their families. American fathers, who statistically speaking spend less time with their children and work more hours than mothers do, seemed especially smitten with the additional bonding time. An article in Vox about pandemic fathering from June 2020 quoted a Chicago dad: 'Every morning, the kids come in the room and we get to snuggle for five or 10 minutes. Who gets to do that on a Tuesday? That's the stuff I'm kind of clinging to, because that's the stuff you don't get back.' That same month, the Swedish journalist Martin Gelin noticed how much American dads were enjoying themselves and wondered in a guest essay for Times Opinion if these shifts in caregiving might become more permanent, and whether American dads could become more like Nordic ones. Five years later, we have an answer: American dads are still spending more time with their children than they were pre-Covid. We found this out by asking Misty Heggeness, the co-director of the Kansas Population Center at the University of Kansas, to crunch the numbers for us. She and her team at the Care Board, a new dashboard that collects and analyzes data around caregiving in the United States, found that fathers of children ages 10 and under were doing about seven minutes more per weekday and 18 minutes more per weekend day, for a total of 1.2 hours more child care a week. (The year 2020 is excluded from this data set because it was such an outlier.) When you narrow the age range of fathers from 25 to 44, which is roughly the millennial generation, fathers are doing 17 more minutes of care per weekday and 32 more minutes per weekend day, for a total of 2.5 hours more child care a week. If you select for dads who are 25 to 44 and also part of the sandwich generation — that means in addition to having at least one kid under 10, they are also caring for older family members — the pandemic fatherhood effect is even more pronounced. Millennial sandwich generation dads are doing more than seven hours more child care per week than they did 10 years ago. Where is this time coming from? In general, dads are working fewer hours and replacing leisure time with child care, Heggeness noted. They are also multitasking, so while that seven hours seems like a ton, it's probably not the case that they're spending every minute of that time solely focused on their kids. This might look like kids tagging along while parents run errands, dads checking email on the sidelines at a baseball game or fathers tackling the yardwork while their children look for four-leaf clovers. Heggeness & Co. pooled statistics over five-year periods to make the comparison between pre- and post-pandemic fatherhood, so the above charts used data from 2011 to 2015 and then 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to show the change over time. When you look at the data broken down by year, there was a big jump in dads performing child care from 2019 to 2021, and that change really stuck. When I saw the data broken down, it made intuitive sense. We have known for a long time, based on data on paternity leave in other countries, that when dads spend more time with their babies, those patterns of care can be sticky. I also wondered if some of the increase in child care was because of the generational change between Generation X and millennials; by the pandemic, the majority of parents of young children were born in the '80s and '90s. Gen X was largely raised by the silent generation, and millennials were raised by post-sexual-revolution boomers, who had more progressive ideas about gender roles. Finally, though many companies and the federal government are clawing back remote and hybrid work, it's possible that the increase in flexible working locations from 2021 to 2023 allowed some dads to spend a few extra hours with their kids around the edges of work. We're in a retrogressive political and cultural moment, when the valorized ideal of the American family involves a woman managing all domestic labor. But that's not the reality that a plurality of American families are living, and it's not what a lot of dads appear to want. They want to be more involved in their children's lives, from surprise morning snuggles to bedtime reading and everything in between. End Notes
