The Daily

This episode contains references to suicide and abuse that may be upsetting to some listeners. A few months ago, we told the story of N, a teenager in Afghanistan whose family was trying to force her to marry a member of the Taliban. Her identity has been concealed for her safety. N resisted, and her father and brother beat her, leading her to attempt suicide. Then she escaped. This is what happen...

Nearly a decade after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed piers and damaged riverside social housing projects, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to floods. Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic, explores the nine-year effort to redesign Lower Manhattan in the wake of the hurricane, and the design and planning challenges that have made progress increment...

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus is incredibly contagious — it is able to infect people with even greater frequency than the Delta variant, and it is skilled at evading the immune system’s defenses. Much is still unknown about the new variant, and scientists are racing to understand its threat. But amid the uncertainty, there’s good news about a prospective new virus treatment: A pill by Pfi...

Anti-abortion activists across the country are optimistic that they might be on the cusp of achieving a long-held goal of the movement: overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that extended federal protections for abortion. But many abortion rights activists are hopeful, too. They are watching closely to see whether the Food and Drug Administration will roll back restrictions on o...

The economic situation in Afghanistan is perilous. Banks have run out of cash. In some areas, Afghans are selling their belongings in ad hoc flea markets. Parents wait around hospitals and clinics in the hopes of getting treatment for severely malnourished children. We hear about what the unfolding crisis looks like on the ground, why the economy has deteriorated so quickly, and what role the Unit...

In July, a group of men stormed the presidential compound in Haiti and assassinated the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse. Months later, the case remains unresolved. Investigating the killing, the Times journalist Maria Abi-Habib found that Mr. Moïse had begun compiling a list of powerful Haitian businessmen and political figures involved in an intricate drug trafficking network. Guest: Maria Abi...

This episode contains strong language.  The Steele Dossier — compiled by Christopher Steele, a British former spy — was born out of opposition research on Donald J. Trump, then a presidential candidate, and his supposed links to Russia. The document, full of salacious allegations, captured and cleaved America. But now, a main source of the dossier’s findings — Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst — h...

In Memphis, as in America, the benefits of homeownership have not accrued equally across race. Housing policy in the United States has leaned heavily on homeownership as a driver of household wealth since the middle of the last century, and, for many white Americans, property ownership has indeed yielded significant wealth. But Black families have largely been left behind, either unable to buy in...

In November, Peng Shuai — one of China’s most popular tennis stars — took to Chinese social media to accuse Zhang Gaoli, who was a member of China’s seven-member ruling committee, of sexually assaulting her. Within minutes, Chinese censors had taken down Ms. Peng’s post, and, for weeks, no one sees or hears from her. We look at Ms. Peng’s story and what China’s attempts to censor her have meant fo...

This episode contains details about suicide deaths and strong language.  A few years ago, a website about suicide appeared. On it, not only do people talk about wanting to die, but they share, at great length, how they are going to do it. Times reporters were able to identify 45 people who killed themselves after spending time on the site, several of whom were minors. The true number is likely to...

The Russian military is on the move toward the border with Ukraine, with American intelligence suggesting that Moscow is preparing for an offensive involving some 175,000 troops. Could the moves herald a full-scale invasion? And if so, what is driving President Vladimir V. Putin’s brinkmanship over Russia’s southwestern neighbor? Guest: Anton Troianovski , the Moscow bureau chief for The New York...

Last week, after a shooting at Oxford High School in the suburbs of Detroit that left four teenagers dead, local prosecutors decided on a novel legal strategy that would extend criminal culpability beyond the 15-year-old accused of carrying out the attack. But could that strategy become a national model? Guest: Jack Healy , a national correspondent for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The D...

This episode contains descriptions of self-harm and alleged sexual abuse. When Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail, dozens of his alleged victims lost their chance to bring him to justice. But the trial of his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, on charges that she recruited, groomed and ultimately helped Mr. Epstein abuse young girls, may offer an opportunity to obtain a degree of reckoni...

In her book, “My Body,” Emily Ratajkowski reflects on her fraught relationship with the huge number of photographs of her body that have come to define her life and career. Some essays recount the author’s hustle as a young model who often found herself in troubling situations with powerful men; another is written as a long, venomous reply to an email from a photographer who has bragged of discove...

Stephen Sondheim died last week at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91. For six decades, Mr. Sondheim, a composer-lyricist whose works include “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” transformed musical theater into an art form as rich, complex and contradictory as life itself. “For me, the loss that we see pouring out of Twitter right now and everywhere you look as people write about their memories...

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that was a frontal challenge to Roe v. Wade, the nearly 50-year-old decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. The case in front of the justices was about a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. For the state to win, the court, which now has a conservative majority, would have to do real damage to the centra...

Amazon is constantly hiring. Data has shown that the company has had a turnover rate of about 150 percent a year. For the founder, Jeff Bezos, worker retention was not important, and the company built systems that didn’t require skilled workers or extensive training — it could hire and lose people all of the time. Amazon has been able to replenish its work force, but the pandemic has exposed the v...

The story of the Omicron variant began a week ago, when researchers in southern Africa detected a version of the coronavirus that carried 50 mutations.  When scientists look at coronavirus mutations, they worry about three things: Is the new variant more contagious? Is it going to cause people to get sicker? And how will the vaccines work against it?  We explore when we will get the answers to the...

This episode contains strong language.  Heading into deliberations in the trial of the three white men in Georgia accused of chasing down and killing Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black man, it was not clear which way the jurors were leaning.  In the end, the mostly white jury found all three men guilty of murder. We look at the prosecution’s decision not to make race a central tenet of their case, an...

After a landslide re-election in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s control over India seemed impossible to challenge. But a yearlong farmers’ protest against agricultural overhauls has done just that, forcing the Indian prime minister to back down. How did the protesters succeed? Guest: Emily Schmall , a South Asia correspondent for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbo...

In the 1950s and ’60s, the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, one of the oldest African-American neighborhoods in the United States, was a vibrant community. But the construction of the Claiborne Expressway in the 1960s gutted the area. The Biden administration has said that the trillion-dollar infrastructure package will address such historical wrongs. How might that be achieved? Guest: Audra D.S...

This episode contains strong language. On Aug. 25, 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager, shot three men, two of them fatally, during street protests in Kenosha, Wis., over the shooting of a Black man by a white police officer. Mr. Rittenhouse’s trial, which began on Nov. 1, revolved around a central question: Did his actions constitute self-defense under Wisconsin law? Last week, a jury decided that...

As the novel coronavirus spread and much of the world moved toward isolation, dream researchers began rushing to design studies and set up surveys that might allow them to access some of the most isolated places of all, the dreamscapes unfolding inside individual brains. The first thing almost everyone noticed was that for many people, their dream worlds seemed suddenly larger and more intense. On...

For three decades, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, a former Soviet nation in Eastern Europe, ruled with an iron fist. But pressure has mounted on him in the past year and a half. After a contested election in 2020, the European Union enacted sanctions and refused to recognize his leadership. In the hopes of bringing the bloc to the negotiating table, Mr. Lukashenko has engineered a migr...

The U.S. economy is doing better than many had anticipated. Some 80 percent of jobs lost during the pandemic have been regained, and people are making, and spending, more. But Americans seem to feel terrible about the financial outlook. Why the gap between reality and perception? Guest: Ben Casselman , a reporter covering economics and business for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily...