The New York Times International - 05.11.2026 — 2026-11-05

The New York Times

INTERNATIONAL EDITION | THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2026

[A sweeping rejection of Trump] Protecting American democracy

The Editorial Board

OPINION

President Trump has spent the past two years trying to subvert American democracy. On Tuesday, voters stood up to him.

In the face of the president's many attempts to manipulate the midterm elections — through extreme gerrymandering, false claims of voter fraud, efforts to block mail voting and more — tens of millions of Americans responded by turning out and rejecting the Republican Party that has enabled him. Democrats retook control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The repudiation was broad enough to overcome America's political

U.S. voters showed that the power to choose their leaders belongs to them. Now they must remain vigilant until officials certify every race.

polarization. Republicans lost races even in traditionally deep-red places, including Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas. They lost because many independents and even Republicans consider Mr. Trump's second term to be a failure.

The outcome creates a crucial check on Mr. Trump's autocratic behavior. It empowers Democrats to investigate his corruption and law breaking and pass legislation that offers an alternative to his counterproductive agenda. The country already feels changed, and it will in fact be changed in January.

The country still faces many long-term problems to which neither party has offered clear solutions. And over the next two years, while Mr. Trump remains president, Congress and judges will need to be prepared to counter further attempts by him to undermine the constitutional order.

Nonetheless, this is a day to feel pride. Aspiring authoritarians often use legislative elections to cement their power and further undermine democracy. In 2026, the American people refused to allow Mr. Trump to do so. The system has held.

In addition to voters, three groups deserve particular credit: election workers, legal advocates and judges. EDITORIAL BOARD, PAGE 10

The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions.

Above, supporters of Jon Ossoff, who won the Senate race in Georgia. Other Democratic winners included, below from left: Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader; Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan's Senate race; Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was elected governor of Georgia; and James Talarico, who won a Senate seat in Texas.

KENNY HOLSTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

NICOLE CRAINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

NICOLE CRAINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

HAIYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The New York Times

INTERNATIONAL EDITION | THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2026

[A sweeping rejection of Trump] Protecting American democracy

The Editorial Board

OPINION

President Trump has spent the past two years trying to subvert American democracy. On Tuesday, voters stood up to him.

In the face of the president's many attempts to manipulate the midterm elections — through extreme gerrymandering, false claims of voter fraud, efforts to block mail voting and more — tens of millions of Americans responded by turning out and rejecting the Republican Party that has enabled him. Democrats retook control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The repudiation was broad enough to overcome America's political

U.S. voters showed that the power to choose their leaders belongs to them. Now they must remain vigilant until officials certify every race.

polarization. Republicans lost races even in traditionally deep-red places, including Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas. They lost because many independents and even Republicans consider Mr. Trump's second term to be a failure.

The outcome creates a crucial check on Mr. Trump's autocratic behavior. It empowers Democrats to investigate his corruption and law breaking and pass legislation that offers an alternative to his counterproductive agenda. The country already feels changed, and it will in fact be changed in January.

The country still faces many long-term problems to which neither party has offered clear solutions. And over the next two years, while Mr. Trump remains president, Congress and judges will need to be prepared to counter further attempts by him to undermine the constitutional order.

Nonetheless, this is a day to feel pride. Aspiring authoritarians often use legislative elections to cement their power and further undermine democracy. In 2026, the American people refused to allow Mr. Trump to do so. The system has held.

In addition to voters, three groups deserve particular credit: election workers, legal advocates and judges. EDITORIAL BOARD, PAGE 10

The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions.

Above, supporters of Jon Ossoff, who won the Senate race in Georgia. Other Democratic winners included, below from left: Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader; Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan's Senate race; Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was elected governor of Georgia; and James Talarico, who won a Senate seat in Texas.

KENNY HOLSTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

NICOLE CRAINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

NICOLE CRAINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

HAIYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

'We are fed up with everything'

In interviews, voters express frustration and fury at Republican Party

BY SABRINA TAVERNISE

From Texas to Maine, Democratic voters thronged to the polls on Tuesday. Independents turned their backs on President Trump. And Republicans seemed to be slipping out of the thrall of a president who has defined American politics for a decade.

In interviews and at the ballot box, voters declared that they were unhappy with the way things were going in their country and wanted a change.

In 2024, Joshua Buchanan, 39, a train-design engineer in Woodruff, S.C., voted for Mr. Trump. Two years later, he had regrets.

"I probably made the wrong choice," said Mr. Buchanan, who this time voted for Annie Andrews, the Democratic candidate for Senate. Her victory over the Trump-endorsed Republican, Darline Graham, would have been unimaginable not that long ago.

Donald Trump took the American political system by storm a decade ago, electrifying working-class voters with his hard-edge populist message. But as the back half of his second term draws near, his job approval has collapsed under the weight of unpopular economic policies and a war with Iran.

Democrats, who were dejected just two years ago, vibrated with fury — and determination to go to the polls. The actual candidates for governor, Senate or the House could seem almost secondary.

"I would crawl on my belly over bro-"

ken glass to vote against that awful man," said Ronan Donohoe, 85, a retired high school history teacher in Portsmouth, N.H.

He said his vote on Tuesday for Democrats was about “letting everybody know that we are fed up with everything the Trump administration stands for, and that we want better.”

In interviews, voters often expressed frustration with how much life costs. Prices are still considerably higher than before the pandemic, but voters said that Mr. Trump, who had promised to VOTERS, PAGE 5

NEWS ANALYSIS

As Democrats take control of House and Senate, U.S. enters a new, uncertain era

BY PETER BAKER

President Trump implored voters over the course of the midterm campaign to "pretend I'm on the ballot." He said it not once, not twice, but 47 times this fall.

And voters did — just not the way he hoped.

The Democratic wave in the U.S. congressional elections on Tuesday amounted to a stinging rebuke of a deeply unpopular president after more than a decade in which he has dominated the national stage. More than any of his predecessors, Mr. Trump deliberately made the midterm contest a referendum on himself, only to pay the price.

The electoral backlash extended even into deeply Republican states and indicated that Mr. Trump has lost his hold over the coalition that lifted him to the White House twice. Frustrated by high gas prices, an intractable war with Iran and allegations of flagrant profiteering by Mr. Trump and members of his circle, voters who had previously taken a chance on an outsider promising change either rejected his party or stayed home.

As of early Wednesday morning, the Democratic margin of victory in the overall national vote for House seats was expected to be about 13 percentage points, the largest that either party has lodged in a congressional election since at least 1976, according to estimates by The New York Times. It will dwarf even the margins that the Republicans won in their two big landslide victories of modern times when they defeated congressional Democrats when Bill Clinton held the White House in 1994 and Barack Obama was president in 2010.

Thanks to redistricting, that margin may not translate into as many seats as the winners gained in those watershed years. Gerrymandered House districts leave far fewer seats available for poaching by the other party than in the past. But the overall margin of Democratic victory indicates that while the president has two more years left in office and can still wield power to great effect, Americans are signaling the beginning of the end of the Trump era.

"It's basically a repudiation of Trump and the Republicans and what they've done for the last two years," said Douglas B. Sosnik, who was White House political director for Mr. Clinton and closely tracked the races this fall. "I do think starting tomorrow, we're in this new phase and it's a transition phase DEMOCRATS, PAGE 6

DEMOCRATIC ROUT STUNS TEXAS

A decades-long Republican grip was shattered in what had been the most populous conservative state. PAGE 5

TRUMP SAYS HE WILL ACCEPT THE RESULTS

The president blamed the fact that he was not on the ballot for Republicans' losses in the midterm elections. PAGE 6

Russia's cheap, fast propaganda: A.I. war songs

NANNA HEITMANN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A military parade on Victory Day, a major Russian holiday, in Moscow in 2024. The technological advances that have reshaped warfare are also reshaping wartime propaganda.

SAN FRANCISCO

Music glorifying invasion of Ukraine floods popular streaming platforms

BY STEVEN LEE MYERS

Russia has a new weapon in its propaganda war against Ukraine: songs generated by artificial intelligence.

Hundreds of them — from maudlin ballads to grinding thrash metal — have sprouted on the world's most popular music streaming platforms, created using a growing number of A.I. music generators, many based in the United States.

The songs glorify Russian soldiers and dehumanize Ukrainians, sometimes with ethnic slurs. They depict the front lines as a hellscape but generally portray President Vladimir V. Putin's invasion in 2022 as a necessary defense.

One of the most popular songs, "Power of Artillery," is a churning rock paean in Russian to artillery systems with names like Krasnopol and Carnation.

"POWER OF ARTILLERY"

She will catch you off guard night and day

The goddess of war, and God will not help you

You won't be able to escape her wrath. You'll have to remember your prayers quickly

The songs have been posted and played millions of times on the world's most popular streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Deezer, according to research published by Terrecon, a nonprofit organization focused on threat intelligence in Ukraine that supports the government there.

The technological advances that have reshaped warfare are also reshaping wartime propaganda.

"They have found new ways to create SONGS, PAGE 2

NEWSSTAND PRICES

Andorra € 5.00

Austria € 4.80

Belgium € 4.80

Britain £ 3.70

Cyprus € 3.40

Czech Rep CZK 130

France € 4.80

Germany € 5.00

Greece € 3.40

Israel NIS 18.00 / Israel / Eilat NIS 15.25 / Friday 36.00 Friday 30.51

Italy € 4.80

Luxembourg € 5.00

Morocco MAD 35

Portugal € 4.80

Spain € 4.80

Switzerland CHF 6.50

Issue Number No. 44,676

The Netherlands € 4.80

Tunisia Din 8.00

Turkey TL 190

U.A.E. AED 18.00

US Military

(Europe) \$ 2.50

Have a way with words?

Play the Crossword from anywhere. nytimes.com/thecrossword

The New York Times Games

Soldiers marching in Moscow in a Victory Day parade in 2023. Russian politics and culture have become increasingly militaristic since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

NANNA HEITMANN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Russia's A.I.-created war songs

SONGS, FROM PAGE 1

cheaper drones and use them on a massive scale," Daria Verbytska, a founder of Terrecon, said in a telephone interview, referring to the Russians. "It's like that with music — creating massive propaganda with the help of A.I."

The extent of the Russian government's role in propagating the songs is not clear, but the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to cultivate social and cultural support for the war.

In September, a director of the Internet Development Institute, an organization in Moscow that works closely with the Kremlin to promote patriotic values, cited in a presentation more than 350 artistic projects about the war the institute has promoted, according to news reports in Russia.

In all, Terrecon cataloged 981 songs generated by A.I. that contained what the group defined as pro-Russian war propaganda. Among those whose release dates could be established, a vast majority appeared after 2024, when A.I. song generators including Suno and Udio entered the market.

"It takes a lot of resources to create a real song with songwriters, production," Ms. Verbytska said. "It's easier and faster and cheaper to make it through these A.I. generators."

Many of the creations echo the sentiment of old Soviet war songs recast in modern musical genres. One, “Soldier’s Daughter,” is a dirge about a fallen soldier and a child left unprotected. The song laments the errors and brutality of war but romanticizes the sacrifice of those who fight.

"SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER"

Forgive me, my daughter, I couldn't become a wall

And you couldn't take cover behind me I hope you'll see a different time When they stop being proud of war

The surge in songs has also been enabled partly because of inconsistent rules by music generators and popular streaming services that have grappled with the increasing use of A.I. in music. Only some services, including Deezer and YouTube, require labeling that identifies A.I. content.

Many of the Russian propaganda songs echo the sentiment of old Soviet war songs recast in modern musical genres.

Spotify enacted a policy in September to label songs generated by A.I. and not to recommend them to users, the company said in response to questions. (The company added labels to songs The New York Times shared as examples.)

The major streaming sites have policies against hate speech and violent content, but few explicitly restrict propaganda.

The sites also do not always capture idiomatic expressions or slurs in foreign languages.

Even when the platforms ban specific words and phrases as harmful, they do not necessarily restrict the martial themes that characterize many of the songs, Terrecon's researchers argued.

The researchers also tested A.I. music generators — Suno, Udio and Google Flow Music in the United States, and Mureka, based in Singapore — by writing prompts in Russian and English for songs promoting Russian propaganda, including dehumanizing content and calls for violence.

The generators refused to carry out some of the prompts, but the researchers were able to create songs similar to the ones they had cataloged and to upload them on YouTube Music and SoundCloud.

"The moderation systems mainly responded to specific banned words rather than the overall meaning of the prompts," Terrecon's report found.

Deezer's spokesman, Jesper Wendel, said the platform reviewed potentially violative content case by case. A spokeswoman for SoundCloud, Sade Ayodele, said the company reviewed reported content, adding that "there is no place on SoundCloud for content that incites or glorifies violence."

YouTube, which is owned by Google, said in a statement that it required creators to disclose the use of A.I. and required all content to comply with policies against hate speech. YouTube also labeled several songs identified by Terrecon and removed one that Terrecon had created as part of its test after The Times's inquiry.

Apple, Suno, Udio and Mureka did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the Internet Development Institute in Moscow, which is subject to economic sanctions imposed by governments in

Europe and elsewhere for its propaganda.

It is unclear how popular the songs are. The song about artillery weapons, posted on YouTube accompanied by a video montage, has amassed more than two million views in two years.

The song, created on Suno, was posted by a user called Sergei Vaseykin, whose biography on a Russian poetry site says he was born in a Siberian village near Tyumen. Mr. Vaseykin, who has posted numerous odes to the Russian war effort (and one to the hockey star Alex Ovechkin), did not respond to a request for comment.

The songs reflect a growing militarization in Russian politics and culture since Russia invaded Ukraine, said Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York City who has long studied Russian propaganda efforts.

They also tap into the Soviet Union's tradition of promoting patriotism through music, especially during and after World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia.

Ms. Khrushcheva noted that those songs — many of them still familiar to most Russians — might have been used as propaganda by the Soviet government but reflected genuine experiences of soldiers' fighting an existential war that touched virtually everyone in the country. By contrast, these A.I. creations are "a simulacrum upon simulacrum upon simulacrum," she said.

"It's easy to chew on — you don't have to feel anything," she added. "It's sort of couch patriotism."

New slang in Japan has a Korean flavor

TOKYO

K-pop culture's popularity is reflected in language used by young generation

BY HISAKO UENO AND JIN YU YOUNG

A ramen packet with a Korean-language label. A TV show whose leading man speaks Korean. A tea commercial in which the pitchwoman says, "gwenchana," the Korean word for "it's OK."

You could be forgiven for thinking these things were created in Korea, but they actually came from Japan.

One hundred years ago, during the Japanese colonial era, Koreans were pressured to adopt the Japanese language and identity while suppressing their own. Now, thanks to the success and influence of South Korea's cultural exports — including K-pop, K-dramas and world-renowned beauty products — the Korean language is seeping into Japan's youth culture.

Moeka Takamatsu, 21, a university student and K-pop fan in Tokyo, said she often mixes Korean words like jinjja (really) and mianhae (sorry) into her daily conversations.

“Even though I don't know anything about Korea, I find myself saying gwenchana quite often since it's a trend on social media,” she said on a recent evening on a street in a part of Shinjuku that has many Korean restaurants and cosmetic stores, and that has historically been known as the Koreatown of Tokyo.

The use of Korean words, or slightly altered versions of them, has increased in recent years in popular culture, advertisements and everyday conversation among Japanese Gen Z, experts said. The phenomenon is called “Hanbono,” a portmanteau of the words Hanguko (Korean) and Ilbono (Japanese).

In Japan, especially among K-pop fans, “there’s a trend where people accept Korean words as they are and use them directly,” said Hiroko Sasa, a Japanese-language professor at Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea. The practice picked up noticeably in 2018, she said, when the BTS album “Love Yourself: Tear” was released and Blackpink performed in Tokyo and Osaka.

The Korean and Japanese languages' similar phonetics and the physical proximity of the two countries makes it easier for Japanese people to pick up Korean — and vice versa — than other languages, experts said. Millions of tourists fly back and forth between the countries each year, according to South Korean government data.

Describing the Hanbono phenomenon, Maya Fujisawa, a Tokyo resident who works at a Korean-language school, said, "It's a strictly informal style of expression used among friends."

More people in Japan were exposed to K-pop and Korean culture during the coronavirus pandemic, experts said. That is when some Korean words — like hyung, a term of affection used by a man to address an older male, and unni, the female variant of hyung — started being used more widely in Japan. Parallel terms do not exist in Japanese.

"The language became something anyone could easily use, even without Korean heritage," said Choi Eunkyung, a Korean-language professor at Kansai University in Japan. Using Korean is "a way to express that you like K-pop or culture."

Japan colonized Korea for about four decades, during which it stripped the Korean language of its official status and required legal documents and school textbooks to be written in Japanese. In 1942, Japanese colonial authorities arrested scholars of a group that studied and disseminated Korean texts.

After the country's liberation in 1945, Korean scholars established a standardized Korean language to restore native literacy and orthography. In the 2000s, the South Korean government created language institutions to expand Korean education globally.

South Korea has now become a cultural powerhouse. Japan was among the first overseas markets for K-pop in the early 2000s.

While diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan have improved in recent years, territorial disputes and historical grievances endure. And Hanbono has yet to take hold among the wider population in Japan.

“Korean words were used as a kind of secret slang around the time I was in high school,” said Lee Sang-chul, 64, a man of Korean descent who grew up in Japan, as part of a historically marginalized section of society.

Now, young people in Japan “judge things on their own merit without drawing lines based on nationality,” said Mr. Lee, a director of the Korean Residents Union in Japan. “Isn’t this a positive trend?”

Hisako Ueno reported from Tokyo, and Jin Yu Young from Seoul.

CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Korean-language signs alongside Japanese ones in Tokyo's Koreatown district. When Korea was a Japanese colony, Koreans were pressured to adopt the Japanese language.

Moscow tries to amplify political turmoil in Poland

SERGEI GAPON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

The Polish-Lithuanian border with Kaliningrad, Russia. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland had beefed up security in response to “disturbing movement” in Kaliningrad.

WARSAW

BY ANDREW HIGGINS

When Poland's centrist government sent the riot police last week to seal off the country's Constitutional Tribunal amid a long standoff over control of the court, its right-wing enemies accused it of staging a criminal "coup d'état."

Now, Russia has jumped in, too, fanning claims of a putsch by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and amplifying attacks on Poland's pro-European government by hard-right politicians at home and abroad.

Mr. Tusk, long reviled by Moscow because of his strong support for Ukraine, sent police officers to the court after right-wing protesters gathered outside to denounce the suspension of its chief justice, an ally of Poland's former governing party, Law and Justice.

Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now vice chairman of the Kremlin's security council and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, declared on Sunday that “a constitutional coup is underway in Poland.”

Claims of a coup at the Constitutional Tribunal, the focus of a long political struggle over the Polish judiciary, have dominated recent attacks on Mr. Tusk by his right-wing enemies at home and Kremlin-friendly European politicians like Marine Le Pen of France, Nigel Farage of Britain and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands.

Right-wing allies of the suspended chief justice, Bogdan Swieczkowski, who over the weekend still controlled the tribunal's social media account, accused their rivals of “committing the crime” of a putsch, a charge quickly taken up by a swarm of commentators on X, Telegram and internet bulletin boards.

Referring over the weekend to often false claims on social media of violence and police brutality at the court, Mr. Tusk said, "They are using an army of Russian bots on the internet."

Russia and Europe's E.U.-skeptic hard right seem eager to inflame Polish tensions in the hope of weakening Poland's staunchly pro-Ukraine and pro-European Union government at a time when Moscow is working hard to undermine Europe's support for Ukraine.

Those efforts suffered setbacks with the election defeat in April of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a long-time opponent of helping Ukraine; and of Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia's longtime leader, on Oct. 25. Mr. Vucic had resisted imposing sanctions on Russia and met regularly with Mr. Putin, even as he turned a blind eye to the sale of Serbian weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

The victors in Serbia's recent election, a new movement called Student List, Students Win, say there will be no sharp turn away from friendly relations with Russia. But in a sign that the mood in

Belgrade may be shifting, the Serbian Central Bank announced on Saturday that it was shutting down Alta Bank, a lender that Russian citizens and companies had used to transfer funds to and from Russia.

The prosecutor's office for organized crime said on Monday it had arrested the bank's Croatia-born Serbian owner and two executives in connection with an investigation into the illegal removal of nearly \$400 million from the bank's vault.

Poland stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Serbia in relation to Russia and has been a frequent target of abuse, disinformation campaigns and sabotage operations by Moscow.

Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said on Sunday on Telegram that Poland faced “collapse and tragedy” akin to the 2014 political crisis in Ukraine that led to the downfall of President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Mr. Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014 after months of protests against him in Kyiv, opening the way for a new government that Russia immediately denounced as dominated by Nazi nationalists, a false claim used by Mr. Putin to justify his full-scale invasion in February 2022.

On Tuesday, Mr. Tusk said Poland had launched a “special operation” involving counterterrorism police, intelligence officers and beefed-up border security on its northern frontier with Russia, calling it a response to “disturbing movement” that could be preparation for “armed incursions.”

Mr. Tusk said the movement just across the border in Kaliningrad — a

Russian region sandwiched between Poland, the Baltic Sea and Lithuania — involved unidentified people carrying flashlights, whose intentions were not clear.

"It's not a coincidence that this tension, provoked by the Russians, is occurring today," he said, citing "global uncertainty and confusion" over the elections in the United States and a "sense of conflict and instability" in Poland because of the constitutional court dispute.

Mr. Tusk, in his weekend speech defending the deployment of riot officers outside the court, said of the Polish right-wing politicians' accusations of a coup: "It's no coincidence they are finding support among pro-Russian forces worldwide."

Ms. Zakharova accused Polish officials of hypocrisy, saying the court standoff "is essentially the very same thing they supported and blessed among their Ukrainian neighbors 12 years ago."

Mr. Medvedev also compared Poland's fracas over the court to events in Ukraine, claiming on X that "liberals — protégés of Brussels-backed Tusk — are hounding the conservatives from the Law and Justice party" and that "the method used is exactly the same as in neo-Nazi Ukraine."

The dispute over the Constitutional Tribunal dates back a decade to when Law and Justice came to power in 2015 and refused to seat justices already appointed by Parliament, naming its own right-wing judges instead. Years later, Europe's highest court, the European Court of Justice, ruled this illegal and declared the tribunal's decision invalid.

After Law and Justice lost an election in 2023, a new coalition government led by Mr. Tusk sought to undo what it saw as the previous administration's degradation of judicial independence. It was blocked by the president, an ally of Law and Justice's who has used his largely ceremonial powers to prevent new judges from being sworn in.

The current president, Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist former historian elected last year and, like his predecessor, an ally of the previous governing party, has kept five judges appointed by Parliament from taking their seats on the bench by refusing to attend their swearing-in ceremonies.

Under Polish law, the president cannot veto appointments to the Constitutional Tribunal, but judges are supposed to be sworn in during ceremonies “before the president.”

These new judges, who took their oaths in Parliament while declaring they were doing so “before the president,” on Friday entered the court. One of them, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, announced the suspension of the chief justice, Mr. Swieczkowski, an ally of Mr. Nawrocki’s who insists the new judges are impostors because they were not sworn in personally by the president.

This prompted Mr. Nawrocki, who was flying to Senegal at the time, to turn around his plane midair, rush back to Warsaw and push his way through the police cordon around the court. He scuffled with the new judges, denouncing them as illegitimate.

Alisa Dogramadzieva contributed reporting from Belgrade, Serbia.

Arab parties are successful but sidelined

NEWS ANALYSIS

A volunteer with the Joint List, one of two main Arab factions, reading election results in Lod, Israel, on Friday. The two factions secured 19 out of 120 seats in Israel's Parliament.

DAVID GOLDMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Gains in Israeli election may not lead to inclusion in a governing coalition

BY DAVID M. HALBFINGER AND NATAN ODENHEIMER

Israel's democracy is facing a huge test after Arab political parties made historic gains in last week's election.

And opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are facing an enormous dilemma over whether Arab lawmakers should now be given a share of power in a new government.

Mr. Netanyahu's opponents secured a clear majority in the Parliament by winning 67 out of 120 seats. But 19 of these were won by the Arab parties, and their inclusion in a governing coalition is seen as so problematic by many Israeli Jews that opposition leaders are putting themselves through contortions looking for ways to form a government that would not rely on Arab lawmakers.

The aversion to building a government with the two main Arab factions — the United Arab List, or Raam, and the Joint List, which comprises three smaller parties — is enormously frustrating to political activists who helped drive Arab turnout to a near-record high of 77 percent last week.

"Why is it so complicated? A vote of an Arab citizen of Israel should equal no less than the vote of a Jewish citizen," said Alon-Lee Green, a founder of the Jewish-Arab organization Standing Together.

The efforts to sideline the Arab parties also fuel complaints among many Arab citizens, who represent about 20 percent of the country's population, that Israeli Jews welcome their participation in the political process only up to the point where they might wield real power.

"This is the problem with Israeli democracy," said Thabet Abu Rass, a long-time advocate for Arab-Jewish partnership. "It's a democracy for Jews, but it's a Jewish state for Arab citizens like me. We Arab citizens are entitled to the same rights, and would like to use them to dictate who's going to lead the country."

"But some Jews say no, democracy is for Jews only," he said. This has become especially true since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, he said.

Indeed, welcoming the Arab parties into a new government, particularly at a time of conflict, is dismissed by many Jewish Israelis as unworkable, overly risky, and even unconscionable.

Few would deny that racism plays a part. But Israeli Jews also view the particular Arab parties — Raam, headed by Mansour Abbas, and the Joint List, led by Yousef Jabareen — with varying degrees of skepticism.

Mr. Abbas's party has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood movement, as does Hamas, a history that right-wing critics often highlight in denouncing him.

But Mr. Abbas was once the first law-maker from an independent Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, and he has won many Jewish admirers by working with Jewish lawmakers. He has focused on domestic issues affecting Arab citizens, like violent crime and discriminatory housing policies, and devoted little attention to Israel's policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Joint List's members, by contrast, have focused more on Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories and have generally preferred to criticize government policy from the opposition. Some have assailed Israel's war in Gaza as genocide or referred to slain Palestinian militants as "martyrs."

"Abbas managed to make himself more legitimate because he made it very clear he's in politics to look after the domestic affairs of his own community," said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a non-partisan research group. "But you don't hear the same music from the members of the Joint List."

Mr. Plesner noted that even Mr. Abbas, when asked whether he supports toppling Hamas, deflects the question. "Any Zionist Israeli expects that any government would work toward toppling Hamas, because of what Hamas did and wants to do to Israel," Mr. Plesner said.

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Jabareen bristle at such questions as demeaning and tantamount to demanding loyalty oaths. Both men have condemned the Oct. 7 attack, and Mr. Abbas has said that such violence has only harmed the Palestinian cause.

Before last week's election, Arab parties never held more than 15 seats in Parliament. Until Mr. Abbas joined the governing coalition in 2021, Arab party leaders generally resisted taking part in governments and thus sharing in responsibility for Israel's occupation and military actions.

But discriminatory policies, like the demolition of Arab citizens' homes built without official permits, and soaring crime in Arab towns that Arab Israelis attribute to police negligence, have prodded lawmakers like Mr. Jabareen and others in the Joint List to vow to do all they can to drive Mr. Netanyahu's government from power.

Discrimination against Arab citizens also undercuts Israel when it trumpets its democratic credentials beyond its borders.

For the anti-Netanyahu opposition, led by the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, the options for assembling a governing coalition are all uncomfortable.

He could try forming a minority government of fewer than 61 seats in which one or both of the Arab parties would be left outside the coalition but would cooperate to some degree. Or he could agree to a unity government, if Mr. Netanyahu or some of his allies were to accept the opposition's terms to share power.

Mr. Eisenkot could also accept a new round of elections in hopes of a better result, though many in the opposition fear this would benefit Mr. Netanyahu, whose alliance netted only 53 seats in the balloting last week.

Rula Daood, another leader of Standing Together, said that by shying away from including Arab parties in a new government, Mr. Eisenkot was playing into Mr. Netanyahu's hands. She accused the prime minister of seeking to delegitimize the Arab vote by claiming, without evidence, that Arab parties stole the election.

Zvi Hauser, a former center-right lawmaker, warned in the newspaper Israel Hayom that bringing the Arab parties into government could cause a catastrophe. Coalition members, he said, would hold “worldviews that disagree even on basic questions of national security.”

Mr. Hauser wrote that every vote on policies affecting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, enforcement of housing rules in Arab communities or the demolition of the homes of those who attack Israelis could become “a test of coalition survival.”

Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, said that he was crestfallen last week when Mr. Abbas, whom he admired, sidestepped a television interviewer's challenge that he label Hamas a terrorist organization.

Mr. Halevi has denounced Mr. Netanyahu for dividing the Israeli mainstream into his coalition — which puts a priority on Israel's Jewish nature — and an opposition that prioritizes Israel's democratic values. But Mr. Halevi said he feared that if Mr. Eisenkot formed a government relying on the Arab parties, it would destroy the possibility of repairing that rupture for a generation.

"We will be seen as preferring anti-Zi-onists to our fellow Jews," he said.

Among Mr. Eisenkot's allies, Yair Go-lan of the left-wing Democrats party has spoken most enthusiastically of Arab party support. In an interview, he said Israel needed to cure itself of the "psychosis" of treating Arab citizens as potential traitors or second-class citizens, arguing that the Arab public had overwhelmingly proved its loyalty and solidarity since Oct. 7.

"This is the problem with Israeli democracy. It's a democracy for Jews, but it's a Jewish state for Arab citizens like me."

"They are a part of us," he said. "We are on the same team."

Mr. Golan, a former deputy chief of staff in the Israeli military, also dismissed the idea that it was risky to national security to include Arab lawmakers in the cabinet, saying that they would be excluded from the smaller security cabinet where operational decisions are made.

Mr. Golan said he envisioned a government including Raam and relying on support from the Joint List. He compared this to the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, which led effectively with just 56 seats in Parliament and outside Arab backing.

Some Israelis say the election results have presented Israel with a golden opportunity. By making common cause with Arab lawmakers, they say, the opposition could finally establish a national commission of inquiry into the security failures that led up to the Oct. 7 attacks and adopt military conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have long been exempt.

"It's the most delicious moment," said Yosef Abramowitz, a Jewish renewable-energy entrepreneur who said he had voted for Raam.

"Everybody has to grow up — now," he said. "The Arabs have to break free of the Palestinian narrative as their organizing thesis. And Israeli Jewish society has to say that a national commission of inquiry and a full military draft are more important than the mythology that all Arabs are terrorists and terror supporters."

U.S. debates Israeli claims about Iranian chemical weapons

At the funeral processions for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran in July. Israeli agencies have said they believe that Iran is aiming to put chemical weapons on a missile or to sneak them into Israel or another country to use in an attack, according to U.S. officials.

EMILE DUCKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON

Some officials see alarm as part of campaign to draw Trump back into combat

BY JULIAN E. BARNES,

NATAN ODENHEIMER,

ERIC SCHMITT, ADAM RASGON

AND DUSTIN VOLZ

Israel has shared intelligence with the United States asserting that Iran is considering the use of chemical weapons against its adversaries, information met with alarm by some American officials and deep skepticism by others, according to U.S. and regional officials.

Some American officials see the Israeli intelligence as part of a pressure campaign by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to persuade the Trump administration to return to major combat operations against Iran.

Other officials believe that the threats should be taken seriously, given the recent warnings about Iran's preparations to attack American interests.

Israel has shared some of the information with officials in Persian Gulf countries. Several doubted that Iran was developing plans to use chemical weapons and believe that Israel is trying to push the United States and its partners to return to a more intense phase of the war.

American claims about Iran's chemical weapons, or its intent to build them, go back decades. In 2003, Iran acknowledged it had developed chemical capabilities during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s but said it later dismantled them.

In recent years, the United States has publicly asserted in its annual unclassified intelligence assessments that Iran “likely aims” to continue its research and development of chemical weapons.

Iran has publicly denied having chemical weapons and previously described such allegations as psychological war waged by Israel and Mr. Netanyahu.

All of the people interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity, given the secret nature of the Israeli intelligence, the sensitivity of Iranian planning and the classified American discussions.

After eight months of war, the United States and Iran are in something of a holding pattern, exploring the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough and preparing for renewed warfare.

The debate over the new intelligence shows how tense the moment is and highlights the potential for grave miscalculation. U.S. officials have said the Trump administration has no intention of using a nuclear weapon, but Iranian officials are not so sure.

Mr. Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival after he failed to secure a clear path to forming a government in elections last week. Some analysts believe that the veteran leader may be seeking to use a security emergency as leverage to compel opposition leaders to join him in a coalition.

In recent conversations with U.S. spy agencies and other officials over the past two weeks, Israeli officials have portrayed the chemical weapon threat as more urgent than Iran's ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon.

The Home Front Command, the Israeli military unit responsible for emergency response and issuing guidance to civilians, is running drills across Israel this week but is not including chemical weapons preparation as a major part of the exercises.

The command has also not issued widespread reminders to its officers or the public regarding safety guidelines for such a possibility, according to two unit officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media. The Israeli military declined to comment.

In recent weeks, the U.S. military has built up a vast arsenal in the region, with naval ships, fighter planes and bombers ready to launch a relatively short campaign of intense strikes after the midterm elections, should President Trump authorize action.

At the same time, U.S. and other diplomats are trying to forge an agreement with Iran that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, address Tehran's nuclear program and put off further military action. The buildup of forces could be intended as much to support that diplomatic push as to prepare for a return to war.

Iran intensified attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, hoping to exert maximum economic pressure on the United States ahead of its elections, which took place on Tuesday.

The use of chemical weapons is a particularly fraught issue for Iran, one of a few countries that have suffered the effects of them. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein deployed chemical weapons, killing thousands and leading to decades of health problems among some 100,000 Iranian veterans and civil-

There is significant debate over whether Iran would ever use the chemical weapons it develops, especially if not provoked.

ians, according to Iranian experts.

U.S. intelligence agencies have long tracked Iran's development of chemical weapons, which are banned under international law. Israeli intelligence agencies have told U.S. counterparts that they believe that Iran is moving rapidly to develop the technology to put such weapons on a missile or to sneak them into Israel or another country to use in an attack, according to American officials.

For some American officials, the talk of chemical weapons threats from Iran has evoked the flawed U.S. intelligence in 2002 about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had largely abandoned or frozen its nuclear, chemical and biological programs by then, but U.S. intelligence agencies told President George W. Bush's White House that their assessment that Iraq had such weapons was ironclad.

People briefed on the new intelligence had different views on how quickly — or how effectively — Iran could deploy a chemical weapon. While mounting a chemical weapon on a ballistic missile is not difficult, ensuring that the weapon can effectively disperse a chemical agent is, according to weapons experts and U.S. officials. Smuggling a bomb across a border also poses challenges.

Using a drone to deliver a chemical weapon is also a possibility.

A regional official said Israel had presented Gulf countries with claims that Iran was working to make its chemical weapons operational. Israeli officials did not share evidence but briefed the officials on their assessments, which the official said Gulf governments found unserious.

The White House did not comment, but a U.S. official said Mr. Trump would keep America and its allies safe from any potential threat. The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

While there is little debate in the U.S. intelligence community that Iran is developing chemical weapons, there is significant debate over whether its leaders would ever use those weapons, especially if not provoked by further attacks.

The U.S. director of national intelligence warned in 2024 that “Iran probably aims to continue research and development of chemical and biological agents for offensive purposes.”

Dana Stroul, the Pentagon's top Middle East policy official in the Biden administration, said it had been known for more than two decades that Iran stock-piled components for chemical weapons but that Tehran had never deployed them. But Iran might feel "existentially pressured and potentially crossed the line to direct offensive use of these unconventional weapons," said Ms. Stroul, who is now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The United States has monitored a variety of threats from Iran, as intelligence collection intensified after the discovery of an Iranian plot to attack a military base in Britain used by American warplanes.

On Oct. 23, Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, sent Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, a memo warning of the threat of Iranian attacks. U.S. diplomats and other personnel were then put on high alert.

Reporting was contributed by Vivian Nereim and Tyler Pager from Palm Beach, Fla.; Maggie Haberman from Washington; and Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv.

The Celebration of the Dead in Metlatónoc, a remote Indigenous town in Mexico, above from left: Yarivi Guevara lit candles for her father at an altar; a path of marigold petals was laid to guide souls homeward; and townspeople welcomed their loved ones back.

In Mexico, a homecoming for the dead

Abundant marigolds adorning graves in Metlatónoc. The dead are “like gods for us, watching over the living,” one local said. During these reunions, families ask them for guidance.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUIS ANTONIO ROJAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

GUERRERO DISPATCH

METLATÓNOC, MEXICO

A mountain town stages a 10-day celebration of those who have passed

BY PAULINA VILLEGAS

The dead here do not really die.

Deep in the rugged mountains of southern Mexico, the dead returned home last week to Metlatónoc, a remote Indigenous town reached by winding dirt roads where ancestral beliefs remain woven into daily life.

All weekend, firecrackers thundered across the small town of roughly 19,400 in the southern state of Guerrero. The scent of copal incense hung thick in the air, and marigolds blazed orange everywhere. The Celebration of the Dead was underway for the Indigenous people known as the Na Savi, or People of the Rain. For this Mixtec group, death is not an ending but a passage to the place where the dead dwell. And during their 10-day celebration, the departed return to visit with the living.

"Metlatónoc is the only place where people are not afraid of dying because we know that next year you will come back."

Inside homes, elaborate altars stand beneath arches of brilliant orange marigolds, the flower long associated with the passage between life and death. Fruit and sugared bread hang from the arches, their scents joining the flowers' to guide loved ones home. Under the arches, photographs of the departed stand among tamales, atole (a warm, thick corn drink) and other foods the dead once enjoyed. There are tiny, coin-size tortillas for children and pets who have died. Cigarettes for those who smoked.

Millions of families across Mexico gathered over the weekend to honor their loved ones. The Day of the Dead has become a major tourist draw in recent years, featured in Hollywood films and embraced by global pop culture.

But for many, the holiday remains an intimate family tradition. In a country so often scarred by violence and tragedy, the Day of the Dead offers a shared ritual of remembrance across social, cultural and ethnic divides — a collective moment of pause to honor the dead and perhaps confront the fragility of one's own existence.

In some parts of Mexico, the holiday is two days long. In Metlatónoc, it is commemorated for 10.

While altars and visits to cemeteries are common, Metlatónoc's observance blends ancestral Mixtec beliefs with Catholic rites. It includes dances and processions to summon the souls of the dead. Here, the belief that death is just a passage remains particularly strong.

"Life does not end here; it goes on," said Celso Guevara, who emigrated to California two decades ago, joining the many residents who have left this remote mountain town in search of a better life. California is now his home, but he returns each year for the celebration. "The body perishes, but the spirit continues and returns these days. That is why we are happy."

Inside his home, perched above the town's cemetery, a brass band played funeral marches before an altar dedicated to his grandparents. A smaller shrine beside it honored his brother, who died at age 7. But there was little sorrow in the room. His mother, Aurora Solano, swayed and danced to the music.

"Metlatónoc is the only place where people are not afraid of dying because we know that next year you will come back, to hang out, to dance, to eat with your loved ones," Mr. Guevara said.

Time here stands still as the veil between the living and the dead dissolves and the town gathers to welcome its departed with tenderness and devotion. Beginning on Oct. 24, families summon the recently departed, followed on Oct. 28 by those lost for many years. On Oct. 31, the spirits of children are called home. Everyone else is summoned the next day before they all depart on Nov. 2.

Mexico's relationship with death has fascinated Mexican writers, poets, philosophers and anthropologists for generations, particularly the apparent paradox at the heart of its culture: Death is not only mourned, it is celebrated, invited to dinner and even mocked.

That idea echoes the ancestral beliefs of the Na Savi here in Metlatónoc.

The dead remain members of the community. Their stories do not end, nor are those who passed away relegated to memory. For these few days, they come back to be part of the village.

On Saturday, hundreds circled the town's church through thick clouds of incense smoke, carrying armfuls of marigolds and burning white candles to guide the spirits of children home. Each girl carried a small, doll-like figure dressed in a traditional embroidered tunic, representing the children's souls.

At the cemetery, Petra García Moreno sat on her husband's gravestone, gathering blossoms into small bouquets as her son, Rotilio de la Cruz, tied them to a wooden arch above the grave.

The dead are “like gods for us, watching over the living,” Mr. de la Cruz said. During these reunions, he explained, families ask them for protection, health and guidance. Their answers, he believes, come in dreams.

Sometimes the messages come in more mischievous ways.

Yarivi Guevara, 27, said she believes her dead father, Paulino, and her grandparents express any displeasure by toppling offerings in the shrines, or leaving peculiar patterns in candle wax.

Like most families here, she treats the dead as honored guests, serving them coffee and breakfast before anyone else eats, then two more meals. At night, she and her siblings wish them good night.

For those who have left for the United States, like Mr. Guevara, the bond with their home and its shared beliefs endures despite the separation, even beyond death.

"Everyone in this town dreams that when we die we will be buried here because we know that only here will we remain alive," he added.

Later on Saturday, in the neighboring town of Cochoapa el Grande, graves disappeared beneath a sea of incandescent orange.

Families carried flowers, lit candles and arranged offerings. One woman set out popcorn for her deceased sister. Men in cowboy hats drank beer at gravesites as musicians played solemn tunes. Women with long white braids and embroidered blouses sat on tombs, talking to long-gone relatives. Others sat silently beside their dead.

By Sunday afternoon, the streets of Metlatónoc had filled with a solemn procession. Hundreds of mourners carried white candles and flowers, calling for the souls of the departed. Above the sea of mourners rose a black-robed Virgin of Solitude, carried on the shoulders of men and women.

Families waited with flowers laid on the ground facing east, where the sun rises and, they believe, the dead return. Before joining the procession, they lit tall candles to summon their loved ones and illuminate the way home.

"Get up now, Marcelino Rojas!" Florencia Sierra Mendoza, a cultural promoter, called out to her late great-grandfather, pointing to the candle that she said represented his spirit. "Let's go back to your home!"

Deportees on TikTok document the reality of starting over

BY ISABELLA KWAI

Above left, Laymone Khambounleung in Laos, where he is learning to navigate daily life in a country he left as a baby four decades ago. Above right, Bryan Vasquez began turning to TikTok to earn a living while rebuilding his life in San Salvador.

@BIGPOLLITO\_, VIA INSTAGRAM

LAYMONE KHAMBOUNLEUNG

When Laymone Khambounleung was deported to Laos last August, his mother's relatives met him at a holding facility. He did not know what they looked like.

It was one of many unknowns Mr. Khambounleung faced when he was removed from the United States, the only country he had really known, over convictions including burglary and threatening a family member.

Now, he is learning to navigate daily life in a country he left four decades ago as a baby. Mr. Khambounleung, who grew up in Louisiana, can speak Lao, but he cannot read or write in the language. He has befriended other men who, like him, left the country as children and assimilated in the United States.

And like deportees across Latin America, Africa and elsewhere in Asia, he is sharing glimpses of his life on social media, hoping to raise awareness about the challenges and opportunities people face when they are removed to unfamiliar home countries, or third countries to which they have no ties. For some, their online posts also provide an income.

In Mr. Khambounleung's videos, his reactions to sights in Laos, narrated in his Louisiana accent, have attracted millions of views.

"It's all new to me too," Mr. Khambounleung, 41, said in an interview. "I wanted to let the whole world see the Lao culture also, experience it with me while I'm experiencing it."

Between President Trump's inauguration in January 2025 and the end of July, about 980,000 people were deported by the Department of Homeland Security, according to an analysis by Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. While most were intercepted at the border, a substantial number were immigrants residing in the country.

Through their videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, the lives of people who dwelled in the United States for a long time are told in new post-American chapters. Viewers on social media are offered a unique window into what comes after deportation upends a life.

"DEEP DOWN WE'RE ALL SAD"

Being deported for some people means returning to a country of which they have little memory.

Mr. Khambounleung was 3 when his family, refugees from Laos, arrived in New Iberia, La., he said. After a burglary conviction, a judge in 2007 ordered his removal from the United States.

With Laos then accepting few deportees, Mr. Khambounleung stayed on supervised release, and was convicted of additional crimes, including robbery and threatening a family member. He was working as a pipe welder in Texas when Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him last year, he said.

"Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, noting Mr. Khambounleung's criminal record.

He moved in with an aunt and uncle outside Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

"If it wasn't for them, man, I don't know what I'd do out here," he said. "I'd be lost."

With work difficult to find, he filmed his new surroundings: sunsets along the Mekong River, a scooter trip gone awry in a rice field, a building that reminded him of Toad from “Super Mario Brothers.”

"I always want to catch a funny moment," he said. He hopes his posts will help him make a living.

But there are challenges that do not make it to social media. Mr. Khamboun-leung has left family behind in the United States, including a young daughter.

"Everybody in the video — they all smile and laugh and everything," he said. "But deep down we're all sad."

Bryan Vasquez, 30, is also adjusting to life in an unfamiliar home country. He was deported to El Salvador in 2020.

Mr. Vasquez, too, had been brought to the United States by relatives. A judge ordered his removal as a child in 2007. But Mr. Vasquez said he was unaware of the deportation order, and it was not enforced until 2020, after he was convicted of conspiring to transport an undocumented migrant.

"I remember just looking at the streets and just crying," Mr. Vasquez said. "I literally messed up my life for quick money."

Mr. Vasquez first stayed with family in the city of San Miguel before moving two years ago to San Salvador, the capital.

"That's when I was finally able to feel like, 'OK. I like it here,' he said.

Last year, inspired by similar videos, Mr. Vasquez began posting about El Salvador on TikTok, also hoping to earn an income. He documented the cost of living, from iPhones to pupusas, and sights he thought would interest Americans.

Mr. Vasquez said he missed his family and his job as a medical assistant, and comforts like Chick-fil-A.

But, he said, he finds life in El Salvador less stressful. "As of right now, I feel good over here," he said.

STREAMING LIFE IN MEXICO

Other deportees, like Raúl Hernández, use social media to process a situation they never imagined: being deported to a third country.

"I earned my deportation," said Mr. Hernández, a Cuban citizen who was convicted of several drug charges as well as burglary. He was deported to Mexico last August, in line with a Trump administration policy that has also sent people to African countries not their own, like Eswatini, South Sudan and Rwanda. "What I didn't earn was getting sent to a third country without due process," he added.

The D.H.S., in a statement, said he did receive due process. It defended its use of third-country removals as an “essential public safety tool,” arguing that there are safeguards in place.

Mr. Hernández, 29, was 7 when he was brought to the United States. His convictions led to revocation of his residency and a 2020 removal order. In May of 2025 he was detained by ICE.

He said he and other detainees were bused from a detention center in Arizona to Tabasco, Mexico. Mr. Hernández now lives in Cancún, where his father retired. He cannot work because he lacks legal status in Mexico. And he cannot be returned to Cuba, which has often refused repatriations.

"You're here in a worse limbo than you were in before you came," he said.

He began posting, he said, to educate other Cubans about third-country deportations. Now, he streams on TikTok most days and shares interviews with other deported Cubans.

"I STILL CONSIDER THAT HOME"

Social media is also documenting the toll of deportation on families.

Catherine Coe, 33, an American, began sharing on TikTok after her husband, Santiago Benitez, was deported last September.

"I had to let people know what was happening," she said, including to people not convicted of serious crimes.

Mr. Benitez, 37, arrived from Mexico in 2013 as an undocumented immigrant. The couple lived in Alabama, married and had been seeking residency for Mr. Benitez when he was detained by immigration authorities. He had no criminal record aside from charges related to illegal entry, Ms. Coe and a lawyer said. (The Times found traffic-related offenses but no other criminal record for Mr. Benitez.)

Faced with the prospect of her children being separated from their father, Ms. Coe decided to move with the family to Tijuana.

Now, as they await the outcome of Mr. Benitez's visa application, Ms. Coe is commuting from Mexico to Southern California to her job as a nurse.

On TikTok, she documented what she called “the hardest year of her life”: packed up boxes at their family home; her son’s last day of school in the United States; new routines in Tijuana.

For all the disruptions, sharing their lives on social media is helping deportees maintain their ties to the United States.

"I still consider that home over there," Mr. Khambounleung said. "I'm forced to be here."

Jennifer Jenkins contributed research.

'An earthquake': A Democratic rout stuns Texas

Celebrating the wins on Tuesday by James Talarico, top, in the U.S. Senate race in Texas and Gina Hinojosa, right, for governor. Above, supporters of Mr. Talarico. Democrats in Texas rose as blowback against the Trump administration mounted among voters troubled by the war in Iran, an intense immigration crackdown and cost-of-living concerns.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAIYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Vote shatters decades of Republican dominance in statewide offices

BY J. DAVID GOODMAN AND LAUREN MCGAUGHY

Texas may never be the same.

Democrats shattered the 32-year-long Republican grip on statewide offices in what had been, until Tuesday, the United States' most populous conservative state.

James Talarico's victory over Ken Paxton, a scandal-scarred Republican candidate, in the U.S. Senate race was only the beginning of a series of seismic victories for Democrats on Tuesday in Texas.

Gina Hinojosa made history with her defeat of Gov. Greg Abbott, the third-term governor and political powerhouse who, just a few months ago, appeared to have a lock on winning a record fourth term. She becomes Texas' first Hispanic governor.

In one night, the state was transformed.

“Talarico is a symbol. Gina is an earthquake,” said Garry Mauro, a former Texas land commissioner who was among the last Democrats to win a statewide race, in 1994. “It’s a tsunami. The world has changed. The political maps will never be the same again.”

The decades of total Republican Party domination are over. Its hegemony had resulted in a succession of increasingly conservative leaders, from George W. Bush to Rick Perry to Greg Abbott, and increasingly conservative lawmaking, including abortion bans, Christian

teaching material in public schools and expanded gun rights.

Democrats in Texas rose as national blowback against the Trump administration mounted among voters troubled by the war in Iran, an intense immigration crackdown and cost-of-living concerns. But Mr. Paxton owed much of his success to his closeness to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Abbott tied himself closely to Mr. Trump's policies.

Republican leaders in the state also embraced a data center boom that was unpopular in many rural and suburban areas and pushed through a school voucher program that many saw as undercutting public schools. In 2026, some party members made the state's swelling South Asian community a boogeyman, warning of sharia law. A candidate for a top regulatory job attacked his opponents with slurs for gay and disabled people.

"I've watched Republicans fumble this ball from bottom to top," said Austin Vaughn, 31, of Fort Bend County, who said he "literally checked every blue box for the first time in my life," referring to the color representing Democrats.

He said he used to feel at home in the Republican Party in Texas, and even worked for a state legislator. But in recent years, the party "got really out of control socially."

He now has a daughter and did not like the state's stringent abortion ban. And, he said, while the party used to have a good message boosting and attracting businesses, Republicans long ago lost that plot.

"No one can afford anything anymore," he said. "Our water and air is the dirtiest and our education is horrible."

Also swept away on Tuesday was the assumption that Texas' political future would resemble its past. In its place, something far less certain, more contested and decidedly Democratic emerged.

It was, for Democrats, so unexpected and so sudden, that many were still processing the implications. “I’m jubilant,” Rafael Anchía, a Democratic state representative from the Dallas area, said as he watched the returns at Mr. Talarico's election night party in Austin. "This is exceeding my wildest expectations."

Mr. Anchía said that Democrats had racked up big gains all over the state, even in formerly conservative suburbs, even in rural areas where they had not competed for years: "It's a nuke."

The magnitude of the Democratic wave was amplified by the remarkable spectacle of Elon Musk, the world's richest man, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a doomed effort to preserve the state's Republican leadership. After moving parts of his business empire to Texas, Mr. Musk poured at least \$212 million into supporting Mr. Paxton, which was part of at least \$224 million devoted to races in the state.

Republicans were left rattled and trying to explain not only Mr. Paxton's spectacular loss, but how Mr. Abbott, seen as such a formidable opponent, could have been washed away as well in the national Democratic wave. "Our party is going to have a reckoning unlike any in the history of our state," said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator John Cornyn's doomed primary campaign earlier this year against Mr. Paxton, who had been Texas' attorney general.

As the results crystallized, Democrats believed their victory would draw more campaign money into Texas for future elections, along with greater national support. The party could seize more offices and perhaps have a shot at flipping Texas in support of a Democrat in a presidential election.

"You never give your enemy a beachhead; once they get it, they advance," said Chad Wilbanks, a Republican political consultant and the former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas. "The dam is broken."

Democratic officials said the election could also reshape state policy, ending Texas' role as a laboratory for conservative laws nationwide. Mr. Talarico, as a U.S. senator, will not directly affect day-to-day governance in Texas. But Ms. Hinojosa will have the power to veto legislation and to appoint agency leaders.

"Texas is ready for change," said Kendall Scudder, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. He said Democrats were "excited and ready to deliver on the policies that will make life more affordable" and to "root out the corruption that has plagued our politics for too long."

Democrats believed their victory would draw more campaign money into Texas for future elections.

President Trump crisscrossed the state, hoping he could save Mr. Paxton's campaign in its final weeks. But his efforts at bringing Texas Republicans together against a shared Democratic enemy masked deep underlying divisions within the party.

The state's Bush-era conservatives long opposed Mr. Paxton and his Trump-aligned wing of the party, and instead supported Mr. Cornyn in the primary. They argued that the Republican Party had drifted too far from its principles.

The two main factions of Texas Republicans have been at odds for years. Mr. Paxton often found himself at the fault line of those conflicts. His 2023 impeachment on allegations of corruption by a majority in the Texas House became a referendum on the direction of the party. His defense team argued that a faction of old-school conservatives — aligned with the Bush family and longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove — had been behind the impeachment. Republicans in the Texas Senate, overseen by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, an ally of Mr. Paxton, acquitted him.

Before Tuesday, the closest that Republicans in Texas had come to a statewide loss in recent years was in 2018, when Beto O'Rourke, a U.S. representative from El Paso, came within three percentage points of defeating Senator Ted Cruz. In response, Republicans in the state appeared to moderate their agenda in the next legislative session, focusing less on cultural issues and more on property tax and school financing reforms.

Now, any change in direction will involve the decisions not only of Republicans. It will involve Democrats as well.

"It's a whole new day for Texas," said Mr. Mauro, the former land commissioner. "After I lost in '98, I was thinking we were one cycle away from winning to the next election. It's been a long wait."

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting.

Americans on why they rejected Trump's Republican Party

ford to retire in the country.

VOTERS, FROM PAGE 1

lower prices in 2024, now seemed to shrug off their concerns.

"He wouldn't know what it is to pull into a gas station and put gas in your car," said Suzanne Murray, 78, a retired hairdresser in Phoenix. "He wouldn't know what it is to go into a grocery store and buy groceries on a limited income."

She added: "He's so reckless with the United States."

Ms. Murray has leaned toward Democrats, but Republicans expressed exasperation with Mr. Trump, too. The reasons included affordability, the Epstein files and corruption. And a number of more traditional Republicans said in interviews that they no longer recognized their party.

"The Republican Party has lost its way," said Van Z. Hampton, 71, a registered Republican in Dodge City, Kansas, who said he had voted straight ticket Democrat the first time since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Mr. Hampton, a retired Kansas state judge, voted for Mr. Trump twice in the past, but has become repelled by what he described as unbridled corruption.

"The ship was hijacked by thieves," he said referring to the Trump administration's stewardship of the U.S. government. "It's going in the wrong direction — toward their shore to loot it and unload it."

For Dan Bailey, a sanitation driver from Glen Cove, N.Y., it was Mr. Trump's casual brushoff of the Epstein files and Mr. Trump's cabinet, who included, he said, "a secretary of war who doesn't know anything about war."

"I am so fed up with being lied to," said Mr. Bailey, who said he hasn't voted for much of his adult life, but showed up and voted straight ticket Democrat on Tuesday. "I feel that there has to be some sort of change. I'm hoping my little bit can make a difference."

While the night may have delivered a sweeping win for Democrats, it was far from a mandate. Many Republicans and independents said they defected simply to stop a president they say no longer represents them.

Mr. Hampton, the retired Kansas judge, for example, had advice for Democrats who won on Tuesday: They won votes “not because we love you, but because we need you to do the right thing. Be wise about support you got.”

"I would crawl on my belly over broken glass to vote against that awful man."

Many voters expressed deep discomfort about where they fit in the political system. Many said they felt politically homeless. Mr. Trump has so defined the Republican Party that it was hard to predict what it would mean when he leaves office. And many voters also struggled to define the Democratic Party, beyond its opposition to Mr. Trump.

"There's no Republicans or Democrats anymore," said A.J. Asci, 49, who works in the hotel industry in Savannah, Ga. "America looks more confusing than ever."

Mr. Asci immigrated from Turkey and became a citizen 18 years ago. He said he had learned everything about life in America from his neighbor at the time, whom he still visits in a nursing home. But life in America today feels unstable: He does not think he will be able to af-

And he thinks the money flooding into politics is gumming up the wheels of American democracy.

"You cannot get justice and uphold the laws if you get paid by somebody else," he said. "It's a crooked system."

Many voters talked about their distress at the vitriol that has overtaken political discourse, and said they voted in part to counter it.

Sheldon McCormick, 68, a handyman standing outside his polling station in Waldo, Maine, said he would vote for anybody who stood up for civility.

"For me, decency can go a long way," he said. "There's good in the world, and it's time to get back to it."

A registered independent, Mr. McCormick said he split his ticket, voting for Susan Collins, the Republican senator, and Matt Dunlap, the Democratic candidate for Congress.

Lamont Fisher, 46, an independent voter in Austin, Texas, expressed similar distaste for the country's angry politics.

"Why be so extreme that we can't accept someone else's viewpoints?" said Mr. Fisher, a broadband network tech who grew up in a Republican family. "We're all in the same country at the end of the day."

He said he had voted for James Talarico, who will be the first Democratic senator from Texas in decades.

"His view is, I want purple," Mr. Fisher said. "That's what I believe in too."

Not everyone feels that way. A number of Republican voters said they were perfectly happy with Mr. Trump, and voted the straight Republican ticket with a light heart.

SABRINA SHANKMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

JILLIAN ANTHONY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

NATE SCHWEBER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

JONATHAN HIGUERA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from far left: Ronan Donohoe, who said his vote on Tuesday was about "letting everybody know that we are fed up" with President Trump; Dan Bailey, who was upset at Mr. Trump's cabinet picks and his handling of the Epstein files; Patricia Fay, who was concerned about a takeover by democratic socialists; and Lamont Fisher, who expressed distaste for the country's angry politics.

"I don't live with the guy," said Ofelia Armendarez, a registrar clerk at an elementary school in Visalia, Calif., who voted for Mr. Trump three times. "If he's doing the job correctly, that's all that matters to me."

Patricia Fay, 69, a retired software engineer in Phoenix, said she does not typically vote a straight Republican ticket, but did on Tuesday.

"I don't want Arizona to become another New York or Southern California," she said. Socialists, she said, want "everything for free."

Still, others were excited about progressive candidates.

Jeff Fawaz, 42, who owns oil change and auto shops in Dearborn, Mich., voted for Mr. Trump twice, because of his promises to stop wars and help small business owners. "I just believed him," he said of Mr. Trump. Now, he thinks that "he's the most bought and paid-for president I've ever seen."

On Tuesday, he voted for the Democrat for Senate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Jillian Anthony, Murray Carpenter, Jonathan J. Higuera, Ryan Patrick Hooper, Caitlin Philippo, Nate Schweber, Sabrina Shankman and Tiffany Tan contributed reporting.

Trump accepts results and seeks to explain them

WASHINGTON

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

President blames the fact that he wasn't on the ballot for his party's heavy losses

BY ERICA L. GREEN AND TYLER PAGER

President Trump said that he was "absolutely willing" to accept the results of the U.S. midterm elections, and was prepared to work with Democrats.

"We'll, you know, look forward to working with them," he said in a phone interview on Tuesday night with The New York Times. "We'll probably work something out."

Mr. Trump blamed the fact that he was not on the ballot for Republican losses, and he called his decision to go to war with Iran a “very wise decision.”

He said he had no regrets about endorsing candidates such as Senator Darline Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, who both lost their Senate bids.

Mr. Trump spoke to The Times shortly before 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, while he was watching election results at the White House.

"I'm just looking at these results as I'm talking," he said.

"I see that Darline lost. Wow, that's amazing. How do you think Lindsey would have done if he ran?" he added, referring to Senator Lindsey Graham, who died in July.

Mr. Trump added that he believed that Mr. Graham most likely would have prevailed in his race.

In the short conversation with The Times, the president sounded subdued as he absorbed decisive Democratic wins across the United States.

But he insisted that he regretted nothing about the first two years of his second term, despite the widespread Republican defeats. "I consider it to be the most successful two-year period in the history of any president," he said.

Mr. Trump's pledge to accept the results of the elections followed his sustained efforts over the past year to sow doubt about the security of elections. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security posted a series of social media messages vowing to arrest noncitizen voters, despite the fact that the administration had struggled to find them.

The president's comments came after he huddled inside the White House's East Room on Tuesday night with some of his top aides, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Todd Blanche and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, to watch the results come in. Some in attendance described it as a "dark" and "funereal" atmosphere.

Some guests started leaving before 10 p.m., according to people with knowledge of the departures. Other allies of Mr. Trump said privately that they were happy they were out of town.

Throughout the evening, Mr. Trump vented his frustration at political aides and accused them of giving him bad information about polling in the lead-up to the elections, according to people with knowledge of his remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations.

It was not clear what he meant: Aides to Mr. Trump had spoken openly about the difficult environment for Republicans.

A White House official disputed the idea that the president was frustrated with his advisers.

President Trump said he regretted nothing about the first two years of his second term, despite the Republican losses in the midterm elections. "I consider it to be the most successful two-year period in the history of any president," he said. He watched Tuesday's results come in from the White House, right.

In his interview with The Times, the president said he believed that Republicans had suffered losses because he had not been on the ballot.

"I wasn't on the ticket, and because I wasn't on the ticket, we couldn't get enough people out to vote," he said.

He also said he did not regret the decision to go to war with Iran and “would do that again.” But he acknowledged that voters were unhappy about gas prices.

"I have total veto power, so they have to come to us. And if they have some good ideas, I'm certainly open to working."

"They don't mind the Iran, but they probably weren't happy — they weren't happy with the oil price," Mr. Trump said. "So you know, it's just one of those things. But I don't regret that decision at all. In fact, you know, that's a decision that was a very wise decision for the future of the country and the world."

Mr. Trump said Democrats had already reached out to talk to him about working together, though he declined to identify any of them by name. He said he thought they could work together on the debt ceiling.

"I have total veto power, so they have to come to us," he said. "And if they have some good ideas, I'm certainly open to working."

The bleak scene capped a day when the president remained out of public view, awaiting the results of a campaign that he had insisted should be seen as a referendum on him.

Mr. Trump kicked off the day by making a final pitch to voters in a call to a friendly television program, "Fox &

Friends," promoting his administration's immigration crackdown and claiming that his policies had strengthened the U.S. economy.

“Inflation is solved,” Mr. Trump asserted, even though consumer prices had surged since he took office, rising 3.7 percent in September from a year earlier, driven in part by high energy costs stemming from the war with Iran.

The United States, he added, was “the hottest country in the world.”

The dissonance between the president's rosy assessments and the affordability worries of many voters underscored Mr. Trump's incongruous closing argument. He repeatedly mocked the concerns about affordability, blamed his predecessors for inflation and falsely claimed that grocery and gas prices were falling. He also said that rising gas prices were a negligible price to pay for the war with Iran, which he repeatedly claimed the United States had already won. (On Monday, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea that it was even a war.)

In one of the strangest turns of the campaign, Mr. Trump made his assessments of the male physique a mainstay of his stump speech, focusing in particular on the backside of Senator Jon Husted, Republican of Ohio.

Rarely did Mr. Trump substantively address the issues that voters said were the most pressing in their lives, or acknowledge his own unpopularity. Heading into the midterm elections, views of his handling of the economy — one of his biggest strengths when he ran two years ago — were underwater. Majorities disapproved of his handling of tariffs, the economy, gas prices, the cost of living and the Iran war.

As he traveled the country, the president promised giveaways, floating \$500 Obamacare “refund” checks and \$5,000 for every American adult — called the “Trump Dividend” — if Republicans retained control of Congress.

At the center of the president's pitch was that Americans should think of their votes as going to him. While headlining 30 rallies across the country, Mr. Trump pleaded with his base. "Pretend I'm on the ballot," he often said.

But in the waning days of the campaign, Mr. Trump openly complained about the grueling pace. At a rally in Florida on Friday, he said that he thought it would be his last of the cycle, and that he would be able to relax afterward. "Twenty-eight days in a row of this crap is a lot," the president said.

The day before the election, Mr. Trump chose to make his final public appearance at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a troubled project that had become emblematic of his administration's willingness to skirt laws and suppress dissent to further his efforts to remake the capital.

"We gave this a very strong shot," he said of the election.

"America is ready to go," Mr. Trump added. "They're ready to vote. I hope they're ready to do the right thing."

Throughout Election Day, the White House sent out a flurry of news releases praising Mr. Trump's accomplishments, including one about his "relentless travel schedule."

But as the day wore on, Mr. Trump's agitation burst through in sharply worded social media posts. He lashed out about coverage of his speech at the Reflecting Pool, lobbing insults at Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, and at The Daily Mail for allegedly misrepresenting a joke he had made about wanting to name the landmark after himself.

He appeared optimistic at one point in the day, when he called attention to results in Guam, where a Republican was poised to become governor. "Wow, hopefully that's an indication for things to come!" he wrote.

By early evening, as the president prepared to host a watch party in the East Room, he turned his ire on Fox News, calling a commentator “DUMB AS A ROCK.” He said that he would change the channel until that “LOSER is off the air.” (He added that he would turn back later.)

Shortly after, he was back to railing about the cable channel, decrying its poll questions and complaining that its ratings were low because it spent “too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

As Democrats triumph, U.S. enters a new, uncertain era

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

DEMOCRATS, FROM PAGE 1 and it will last two years. And it will be much more volatile than the last two years."

Mr. Trump quickly tried to save face by insisting that the rout by Democrats was not really a rejection of him since he was not actually on the ballot — never mind that he had told voters repeatedly to vote as if he were.

"I wasn't on the ticket, and because I wasn't on the ticket, we couldn't get enough people out to vote," he told The Times in an interview Tuesday night.

Even many Republicans would roll their eyes at that assertion, as this was a campaign that revolved so demonstrably around Mr. Trump.

It was Mr. Trump who decided to start a war with Iran that jolted energy markets and sent prices at the pump soaring. It was Mr. Trump who chose the candidates, the issues, the strategy and the message.

It was Mr. Trump who demanded complete loyalty from a party whose candidates were nervous about distancing themselves from him. And it was Mr. Trump who shrugged off questions about the ethics of his moneymaking in office, helping propel voter concerns about corruption.

The defeat of two Senate Republican candidates that he personally selected over potentially more electable contenders in traditionally Republican states — Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina — demonstrated the consequences of his interventions. His push to throw out the normal process and redraw House districts in the middle of the decade to try to stack the deck for Republicans backfired.

Many voters told pollsters and interviewers that they felt hoodwinked by Mr. Trump, having believed that he was going to bring down prices and not start new wars. They expected him to close the border, but bristled at what they saw as heavy-handed arrests of people who

The defeat of Senator Darline Graham, who was personally selected by President Trump, demonstrated the consequences of the president's interventions in the campaign.

"Starting tomorrow, we're in this new phase and it's a transition phase and it will last two years. And it will be much more volatile than the last two years."

had lived in the United States for years. They rebelled against the tariffs that increased costs for consumers.

The way Mr. Trump spent his last day before the election proved to be a metaphor for how out of sync his political instincts were with the season. Instead of emphasizing plans to address the cost of living worries weighing on many voters, he delivered his final pre-election address at the Reflecting Pool, talking about algae and pipes. It was a vivid reminder of his obsession with pet construction projects in Washington, despite the warning signs of how it rankled voters — as if Richard M. Nixon had made his final pre-election speech in front of the Watergate complex.

Even if Trumpism may be receding, Mr. Trump has the power of the presidency for two more years and will do everything he can to remain a dominant voice for as long as he can. His allies warned against assuming that he is a spent force.

“Trump’s critics have written his political obituary before and been wrong every time,” said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, a group that promotes conservative economic policies.

"The fix is Republicans getting back to our principles," he added. "That's how we win in 2028."

There is, of course, a natural tendency to draw great lessons from a big midterm wave, to assume that it represents a fundamental shift in the American electorate. It certainly may. But history has seen plenty of examples when it did not last long. And it remains to be seen whether Tuesday's results signal a broader ideological shift among voters.

The post-Watergate wave of 1974 was thought to presage a long winter in the political wilderness for Republicans, but Ronald Reagan brought the party back to the White House just six years later. The 1994 and 2010 Republican sweeps were expected to presage the end of the

Clinton and Obama presidencies, but both came back to win re-election handily two years later.

Lynn Vavrek, a professor of American politics and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the most important factor in the election was sky-high gas prices so it may not follow that the country's political character has profoundly changed.

"It doesn't mean the MAGA coalition is crumbling," she said. "Does it mean the shine has come off Donald Trump a little bit? Yes. Are people less enamored of him? I think the answer to that is yes." But she said it does not necessarily mean that Republicans are going to abandon the "identity-inflected policies" on issues like immigration and diversity that have animated the party under Mr. Trump.

This is, after all, a fundamentally altered party, one that Mr. Trump forged in his own image, empowering those who defer to him and purging those who exhibit independence. “We don’t know how the president’s going to react, but thus far we’ve only seen members of his party acquiesce to him,” said Christina M. Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York.

Joe Grogan, who served as Mr. Trump's domestic policy adviser in his first term, said that regardless of the election results, the president has changed the political landscape by advancing issues that were not adequately addressed enough before, like pushing for better trade deals and securing greater military spending by NATO allies. The party, he said, is not moving back to what it once was.

"We're still in Trump's party, regard-"

less of what happens tonight," Mr. Grogan, now at the law firm Covington & Burling, said before the polls closed. "People who expect Trumpism to get repudiated I think are mistaken. There will be some debates that I think will be healthy for the party. But I just don't see there being a huge wellspring for the party to go back to the one that George W. Bush led for two successful elections."

At the same time, Democrats will debate how to interpret their victory. Their main identity this year was simply being against Mr. Trump, which was more than enough. But progressives will say that it was energy on the left that powered the success, while moderates will say it was the appeal to disaffected Republicans in states like Texas and Kansas that was crucial.

"The biggest story is non-MAGA Republicans have broken with the Republican Party," said Rahm Emanuel, a former Democratic Chicago mayor and ambassador exploring a run for president. "The question is do we want to make this election transactional or transformational? What we do in 2027 will determine that."

James Blanchard, who was first elected to Congress in the post-Water-gate Democratic sweep of 1974 and later served as governor of Michigan, said this year's election felt similar to the vote in that historic year. But he said that does not mean that American politics will return to the way they were before Mr. Trump. "We can never go back, unfortunately," he said. "We're going to have to go forward."

"It's the end of Trump," he added, "even though he's still going to be there."

[Business] Crypto billionaires fund British populist

ILLUSTRATION BY KLAWE RZECZY; PHOTOS BY GETTY IMAGES

Low-profile entrepreneurs handed \$100 million to Nigel Farage's Reform U.K.

BY DAVID SEGAL

For a pub-going, cigarette-puffing man of the people, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform U.K. party, sure has some very rich friends. And two of them keep sending him and his party great gobs of money.

The gobs are so great, in fact, that the money has become Britain's political scandal of the year. Driven by disclosures in the country's Farage-obsessed news media, the tale has all the makings of a Netflix-worthy dramedy, one starring a pair of low-profile billionaires who rarely speak and a pinstriped populist who won't stop talking.

That populist is Mr. Farage, 62, a jovial and polarizing scraper who achieved national eminence as a champion of Brexit. His nativist zeal — he once claimed he was two hours late for a rally because he was stuck in traffic caused by foreigners — is matched only, it seems, by his yearning for wealth. In 2023, he was paid 1.5 million pounds (about \$1.86 million) to appear on the reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here.” (He came in third.) He’s also a highly paid brand ambassador for a London gold dealer, Direct Bullion.

But these paydays were modest compared with the £5 million (about \$6.3 million) that Mr. Farage pocketed in April 2024, when he was campaigning for the party as a private citizen. It was an “unconditional gift,” Mr. Farage would later explain, from a grateful Brexit supporter named Christopher Harborne, a British-born crypto investor who lives in Thailand, where he's known as Chakrit Sakunkrit. In a rare interview with The Telegraph in April, Mr. Harborne said he “wasn't expecting anything in return” for the money.

This arched some eyebrows. Mr. Harborne is worth roughly \$24 billion, The Sunday Times estimates, most of it from a well-timed investment in Tether, the company behind the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT. In June, The Guardian revealed that Mr. Farage had landed a meeting with the governor of the Bank of England and urged him to drop plans for a digital pound, known as Britcoin.

Were it issued, Bitcoin would compete with Tether. Maybe there was some pro quo for all that quid.

Today, Mr. Farage is under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for failing to report Mr. Harborne's £5 million gift. He says he's done nothing wrong. The gift was just the start of his troubles.

In early September, Channel 4 aired secretly recorded footage of senior Reform figures, including Mr. Farage, appearing to discuss ways to evade Britain's ban on overseas campaign funding. (In one video, Mr. Farage drinks wine, eats oysters and praises polls purported to be paid for by a wealthy American donor.) A few days later, London's Metropolitan Police opened an investigation into possible breaches of election law.

A Reform insider complained to the

BBC that the party was starting to look "a bit like a pirate ship." If that was the problem, one ardent supporter devised a curious corrective: more booty.

On Sept. 11 news broke that Ben Delo, another crypto billionaire and a self-described "maths geek," gave Reform the equivalent of \$48.7 million, the largest single political donation in U.K. history. As he explained in an opinion piece published in The Telegraph, he wanted to help Reform turn into a credible governing party.

Mr. Harborne apparently felt one-upped. The following day, he sent Reform \$48.7 million of his own.

"My competitive spirit inspired me to match it," he wrote, also in The Telegraph, "so that is what I've done."

The donations caused face-palms all over Britain, where there are no super PACs and where parties receive limited public funding for parliamentary work and policy development, not campaigns. The whole system operates on a shoestring compared with the United States. Consider: In Britain's last general election, the candidates from every party, in every constituency, spent a combined total of \$125 million, said Sam Power, a lecturer at the University of Bristol, who studies political finance and corruption.

That's about what the campaigns spent in Montana's 2024 U.S. Senate race.

"We are seeing an increasing Americanization of the way in which people are financing politics in the U.K., and we kind of point to the U.S. as the system of worst practices," Dr. Power said. "It's not necessarily a Reform problem. It's a system problem. And it has focused minds into asking, is this actually the way we want British democracy to go?"

In just two days, Reform was deluged with enough money to transform the arithmetic of British politics. And nearly every shilling came from opaque fortunes made abroad, courtesy of a donor base that could fit in a phone booth.

"BANG FOR BUCK"

Britain is not the only country where politics is being reshaped by crypto. In the United States, crypto companies and their billionaire backers have emerged as a bruising new force, rewarding candidates of both parties who support industry-friendly rules and punishing those who don't. President Trump, who once dinged crypto as "highly volatile and based on thin air," has had a conversion. In the first year of his second term, he reported more than \$1.4 billion in income from his family's cryptocurrency businesses, much of it from his \$TRUMP memecoin.

Mr. Farage declined through a representative to speak for this article, as did Mr. Delo and Mr. Harborne. But Mr. Farage has styled himself as a Thamesside Trump, a grinning combatant at war with legacy finance, status quo politics and the mainstream media.

At first glance, he seems an unlikely crypto fan. He is obsessed with borders and nothing ignores borders quite like digital assets. It's odd, too, that he favors El Salvador-based Tether over a home-grown alternative that has "Brit" right in the name.

But crypto is consonant with his image as a fearless outsider and a scourge of the establishment. It's part of a persona he has been fine-tuning since his middle-class upbringing in the Kentish countryside, the son of an alcoholic stockbroker who left the family when Nigel was 5.

In recent months, a pattern has emerged. Mr. Farage mixes money and politics, and a public relations disaster ensues.

He skipped college and worked in the City, London's financial district, as a less-than-successful metals trader, says Michael Crick, author of "One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage." Then he served for more than 20 years as member of the European Parliament, which was a cushy gig, but not one that pays anything close to the salaries in finance.

"He does love the trappings of prosperity," Mr. Crick said, "and of course he has this huge resentment that he devoted his life to politics."

In recent months, a pattern has emerged. Mr. Farage mixes money and politics, and a public relations disaster ensues. After the Parliamentary commissioner opened an inquiry into Mr. Harborne's undisclosed £5 million gift, Mr. Farage promptly quit his seat representing the faded resort town of Clacton-on-Sea. He then announced he would run again for the same job.

"The people of Clacton can decide whether they back me," he said in a video statement, "or whether they back the establishment."

The establishment shrugged. None of the major parties fielded a candidate and Mr. Farage's only real opponent was Count Biface, a comedian wearing a trash can on his head and claiming intergalactic origins.

Though Mr. Farage easily won, that summer sideshow wounded Reform. Then came Channel 4, which broadcast what was essentially a sting operation by Verbatim, a self-described investigative organization. In one of the surreptitiously recorded videos, an actor posing as an American benefactor discussed with Mr. Farage opinion polls measuring support for British parties that Channel 4 says were commissioned by Reform but paid for by a U.S. company. If the polls were an overseas-funded benefit accepted by the party, that could breach Britain's political-donation rules. "Amaring," Mr. Faroo said of the

"Amazing," Mr. Farage said of the polls. "Bang for buck."

He later said he hadn't been listening to that part of the conversation. Two senior aides stepped down after the broadcast. Reform has denied wrongdoing, and an internal inquiry found that the aides, not the party, commissioned the polls.

After the by-election and the Channel 4 report, Reform's popularity started dropping. The Labour party's numbers went up, propelled by the elevation of Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor, to prime minister.

So for Reform, the noisy arrival of roughly \$100 million was well-timed. It changed the subject from “Reform is hurt” to “Reform is rich.”

With the windfall came a risk. Mr. Farage says his party is the voice of “ordinary people.” There’s nothing ordinary about the two billionaires now bankrolling the party.

Both have spent much of their careers overseas, though Mr. Delo said he has returned to Britain specifically so that he can give Reform as much money as he wants. To Ben Habib, a former deputy leader of Reform and now a critic of Mr. Farage, catering to rich émigrés is no better than catering to poor immigrants.

"None of the policies that Farage makes, with the exception of perhaps crypto, will have any impact on these guys," Mr. Habib said. "And yet they're crafting the direction of travel for British politics and the way our country is governed. And I find that really unhealthy."

"I CAN SPEND IT ON FERRARIS"

For men so politically consequential, Mr. Harborne and Mr. Delo are barely visible.

Much of what's publicly known about Mr. Harborne comes from a defamation complaint he filed in 2024 against The Wall Street Journal over a story that he said falsely implicated him in efforts by cryptocurrency firms to mislead banks. A former McKinsey consultant, he moved to Thailand in the 1990s and founded an aviation-fuel business.

Most of his money originated from transactions that started with a fiasco and ended with a fortune.

Mr. Harborne was trading on Bitfinex, one of the world's largest crypto currency exchanges, when it was hacked in 2016. Customers were compensated with dollar-denominated BFX tokens, which many sold. Mr. Harborne saw an opportunity and bought. He converted the tokens into equity and, through subsequent transactions, acquired roughly 12 percent of Tether.

Tether is now valued at \$183 billion and Mr. Harborne owns roughly 12 percent of it. In his defamation suit, which both sides agreed to end in July, Mr. Harborne said he's never had a management position with Tether.

"He just happened to be at the center of something massive at a very oppor-FARAGE, PAGE 8

U.S. consumers still want beef, despite the high price

Cuts of beef on display in a market. Demand has pushed steak prices to nearly \$13 per pound and ground beef to nearly \$7 per pound.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

The demand for pork, turkey and plant-based products is flat at best

BY KEVIN DRAPER

Demand for protein has skyrocketed in recent years as American eating habits have changed.

The Make American Healthy Again movement and new dietary guidelines emphasize protein. Tens of millions of Americans on GLP-1 medications are adding more protein to their diet to retain muscle as they lose weight. Companies have added protein to everything from cereals to Kraft Mac & Cheese.

Increasingly, Americans want their protein through high-quality beef. With the United States' cattle supply at its lowest level in decades, that demand has pushed steak prices to nearly \$13 per pound (about 450 grams) and ground beef to nearly \$7 per pound. Steak prices are up 3.5 percent in the last year, and 16.6 percent in the last two.

The well off among American consumers “have never been more able and willing to pay for great beef, and it has the market outcome of raising the price,” said Glynn Tonsor, a livestock economist at Kansas State University. The average American is projected to eat 59 pounds of beef this year, up from a low of 54 pounds in 2014.

Still, the rising cost of beef — and groceries overall — has been a common talking point on the campaign trail this fall. With the exception of chicken, consumption of other forms of protein hasn't kept up with consumption of beef.

Here's a look at other sources of protein that Americans are eating.

CHICKEN

Chicken is the cheapest and most consumed animal protein. Whole chickens cost just \$2 per pound, while boneless chicken breasts are double that. It is favored by those with health concerns about red meat, even though more recent studies suggest that some of those concerns are overblown.

In the early 1990s, Americans ate about as much chicken as they did beef, about 65 pounds a year of each. Since then, chicken consumption has soared in the United States, with people expected to consume on average about 108 pounds this year. Almost all of that is from broiler chickens, birds developed to yield a lot of meat.

Americans eat a little less than an egg a day — the average American will eat around 270 this year — a number that has barely budged in years. Eggs, another source of protein, cost about \$2.25 a dozen, down from \$6.25 in May last year. That increase was mostly attributed to avian influenza.

Since chickens can lay eggs as soon as 16 weeks after birth, and broiler chickens can reach slaughter weight at seven weeks — compared with nearly two years for cattle — any swings in supply or demand can be addressed quickly.

Only another large outbreak of avian influenza would markedly decrease the chicken and egg supply and send prices up.

PORK

While consumers may be looking to eat more protein, they aren't getting it from pork.

Pork chops cost around a third as much as steaks, but that hasn't been enough to get more Americans to try them out.

Pork consumption has essentially remained flat, around 50 pounds annually per person, for 40 years, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department's data. The cost of pork has remained about the same over the past five years, ranging between \$3.50 and \$3.75 per pound.

Wholesale pork prices are falling, and pork production is down slightly.

Pork sales also suffer more than other meats from high gas prices. According to the Agriculture Department, bacon consumption is a “complement to restaurant meals and road trips,” both of which slow when gas prices rise.

FISH

American consumption of seafood, per capita, nearly doubled since the 1960s to almost 20 pounds in 2023, according to the latest Agriculture Department data.

That growth was almost entirely from fresh and frozen fish and shellfish, as opposed to canned seafood. Consumption of canned fish has remained steady, but its share of fish consumption has declined as fresh and frozen categories have grown.

Almost 60 percent of the fresh and frozen seafood consumed is what the Agriculture Department labels finfish, while shellfish makes up the rest. While eating tinned fish has become trendy (sardinemaxxing, anyone?), the average American still eats just one-third of a pound of cured fish each year.

Seafood prices are extremely vulnerable to tariffs and trade disruptions, as 80 percent of the seafood Americans eat is imported. Seafood prices have risen 6.9 percent over the last year.

TURKEY

Many Americans will roast a turkey for Thanksgiving, and it may be one of the few times during the year they eat a whole turkey.

The National Turkey Federation estimates that 45 million turkeys are sold for Thanksgiving. Sizable amounts are sold for Christmas and Easter as well, but Americans consume most of their turkey in other forms: sliced deli meat, turkey bacon, turkey burgers and so on.

The average American ate 13.2 pounds of turkey in all its forms last year, according to the Agriculture Department, the smallest amount since 1986.

Part of the reason may be that wholesale prices are up. The average per-pound cost for frozen, whole turkeys rose 29 percent from last year, according to the Agriculture Department. The retail cost of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “other uncooked poultry including turkey” is up 9 percent.

PLANT-BASED PROTEINS

The United States grows almost a third of the world's soybeans. But Americans eat hardly any of them, at least not directly.

Around 40 percent of those soybeans are exported, mostly to China, while the rest are sent to crush plants, where they are separated into soybean meal and soybean oil. The meal is mostly used in animal feed, while the oil is used to cook and ends up in all sorts of food products.

Americans consume a lot of soybean oil — at least 25 pounds per year, whether in fried food, mayonnaise or salad dressings. But they eat less than two pounds of soy annually, mostly in soy milk, tofu and edamame.

Despite the rise of companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods and innovation in fake meat proteins, most Americans just don't eat much of them. And now those companies are struggling.

Beyond Meat's market capitalization is about \$125 million, compared with more than \$13 billion when it went public seven years ago. The company reported revenue of \$68.8 million in the quarter that ended June 27, down 8.2 percent from a year earlier. Sales volume was down 9.5 percent, the company said.

From left: Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne. The crypto billionaires each donated \$48.7 million to Reform U.K. in September. In Britain's last general election, the candidates from every party, in every constituency, spent a combined total of \$125 million.

He wants C.E.O.s to say what they believe

CORNER OFFICE

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union since 2001. "I've been frustrated with the lack of engagement," he said of chief executives.

AHMED GABER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Leader of the A.C.L.U. urges the private sector to defend institutions

BY JORDYN HOLMAN

Anthony Romero, the longtime leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, isn't afraid to speak out against government policies that he sees as harmful. He wishes other chief executives would do the same.

Business leaders have appeared reluctant to air their views during President Trump's second term. During that time, tariffs have disrupted supply chains and immigration raids have upended labor markets. Law firms and media companies cut deals and settled lawsuits that many experts said were winnable. Mr. Trump has regularly cast doubt on the integrity of elections and pre-emptively challenged the results of a midterm race in Alaska and thousands of ballots in California.

Mr. Romero, 61, who has run the organization for the past 25 years, recognizes that his role is not akin to that of a chief executive who answers to shareholders. But he believes that corporate executives also have a role to play in defending democratic institutions. He has taken notice of the tech billionaires who donated to the A.C.L.U. during Mr. Trump's first term but have not written checks this time around.

During the 2016 presidential campaign and the first few months of the first Trump administration, the A.C.L.U.'s revenue more than doubled from the previous fiscal year. It waned during the Biden years and jumped again in the lead-up to Mr. Trump's return to the White House, but half as fast as before.

Mr. Romero, who directs some 2,100 employees and more than \$550 million in contributions, says that the A.C.L.U. still must be judicious about the cases it pursues.

"This is not a church," he said at his office with a view of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. "Prayer is not enough. You have to have a plan."

This interview has been edited and condensed.

They don't have to agree with me on immigration or trans rights, but they should think that the functioning of our electoral system is critical, regardless of who you vote for.

What do you want to see from corporate C.E.O.s during the Trump administration?

Do you think executives should speak out on that publicly?

They need to tie it back to their business. For some businesses that rely upon immigrant labor, it's a core issue.

I've been frustrated with the lack of engagement. Many of them are ducking the hard issues, whether it's freedom of speech, the integrity of our voting systems, the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the undercutting of the freedom of the press or the assault on rule of law and the courts.

Assaults on the rule of law in America have massive implications for business because if the judiciary's independence is questioned or threatened by the administration, it hurts the prospects of business.

But I don't want corporate C.E.O.s to try to do my job. Because when they tried to do it, they did it poorly.

government targeting companies. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.

What I find more perplexing is in their private lives. I can list — although I won't, I don't kiss and tell — six Silicon Valley billionaires who wrote large checks to the A.C.L.U. in Trump 1.0 and not one of them is engaged with us today.

Are you talking about 2020? Yes, exactly. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, you had so many who wanted to rush to make statements about the police. They weren't really committed, as you can see now with their backtracking. No one wants halfhearted measures. If you don't really believe it, don't do it.

Some have changed their mind, and they have every right. Some of them are making pragmatic decisions and some are just afraid.

What do executives tell you in private?

They tell me it's hard and I say, "I understand."

The point of being powerful and sometimes wealthy is that it gives you independence to do what you want, to speak your mind. For the very wealthy and the very powerful to feel afraid and to hide, I think is very troubling.

I understand the worry about the

If the president, for instance, pulls out all the stops and tries to subvert the outcome of this election, then that's a moment when profiles in courage will be noted. The leadership of the private sector should stand up.

There have already been a number of suits that we've done that challenged the racial discrimination in algorithms. We've got to make sure the civil rights laws are applied in that context.

One criticism that the A.C.L.U. receives is that it acts as a wing of the Democratic Party. So is there anything that the Trump administration is doing that the A.C.L.U. would defend?

I'm especially concerned with the rights of immigrants.

I can applaud them for not doing things as aggressively as they might.

Where does the A.C.L.U. stand on how A.I. might affect civil liberties? We are taking our time to study it. I want to be sure we get it right.

You have almost \$240 billion appropriated for immigration enforcement. How could A.I. be used as a tool to help further identify, track, detain and deport immigrants?

Department you had before Donald Trump.

And Republicans and Democrats alike are criticizing the ubiquitous nature of Flock cameras. All of this is leading us to think about the implications of A.I. in our work.

There will not be a quick fix. The institutions that constrain government power have been so weakened or dismantled that it will take a generation to rebuild them. You can't just go back and reassemble the same Justice

At the same time, there have been successes that continue. I never imagined that gay people like me would be able to marry their loved one.

I've heard you say that Americans have fewer rights now than when you became executive director in 2001. How does that make you think about your legacy at the A.C.L.U.? We're going through a hard time, and the institutions that constrain power seem to be either breaking or struggling.

Do you worry about what will happen to the institution when the next person sits in your seat? This is not the Anthony Civil Liberties Union, it is the American Civil Liberties Union.

What's something you've learned from one of your youngest employees?

Her opinions, her dissents, her integrity. I've known her a very long time.

It's time for the lightning round. Favorite U.S. Supreme Court justice? Sonia Sotomayor.

mother finished the 10th grade. They didn't know anything about college.

Speak your truth. Don't be afraid of it.

We can lose Silicon Valley donors and still have the rank-and-file folks who are writing an average gift of \$112 a year. The power of the organization is rooted in the card-carrying members and because of that, I don't worry about the leadership.

Tell me about your upbringing.

The first nine years of life in the Bronx and in the Castle Hill housing project. Then, the second nine years in Passaic County, N.J.

When you were growing up, your father, who worked in a Manhattan hotel, filed a legal grievance with his union when he was passed over for a job. How did that impact you? When we wanted to leave the Bronx, my father applied to be a banquet waiter at the hotel. He was turned down initially. They said his English wasn't good enough. He filed the grievance, and he became the first Latino to be a banquet waiter.

There was so much love in my family that I never knew we were humble until years later.

Were you the first in your family to go to college?

I'm the first to finish high school. My father finished the fourth grade. My

How much does your upbringing impact your work at the A.C.L.U.? I was a beneficiary of every government program and institution meant to level the playing field. For me, it worked. I got a scholarship, I got aid, I lived in public housing, I got student loans. I'm a proud affirmative action baby. You don't go from where I started to Princeton, Stanford and where I am now without affirmative action ripping open the doors. I earned my grades, my successes and my failures, but all of these programs give us an equal opportunity to compete. That is the animating force of my work at the A.C.L.U. — let every person fully actualize who they want to be.

It was that filing and that promotion that changed the trajectory of our entire family, where we could just live very differently and better.

Why?

In hindsight, what's a decision you would have done differently? Early on, I would have consulted my board more regularly. I was coming in as a chief executive and sometimes made decisions without the benefit of other people's thoughts.

Do you think C.E.O.s should admit mistakes more often?

The only mistake you shouldn't admit is the one you haven't yet recognized.

What is your most contrarian take?

Divisiveness is not necessarily bad. I'd rather that people are engaging, even when they vehemently disagree, than silence.

What's the last question you asked A.I.?

[Laughs]

Why are you laughing?

Oh god, I should have asked another question.

[Shows me the screen on his iPad] "Any final words of advice for the Jordyn Holman interview?"

The answer: "Don't try to win every question."

The crypto billionaires funding a British populist leader

GEORGE CRACKNELL WRIGHT

FARAGE, FROM PAGE 7

PAUL GROVER/SHUTTERSTOCK

tune time," said Carol Alexander, a professor of finance at the University of Sussex. "It was very risky and it could have gone either way."

Mr. Harborne has little social media presence and seems never to have submitted to a long interview or appeared on a podcast. One of the rare recordings of his voice is the snippet of a presentation he gave at his Thai resort, Kamalaya.

"One of the things we try to help all of our guests at Kamalaya is change one thing, on each visit," he says, seated at a table, wearing a button-down shirt and sounding exceedingly chilled out. "Just one thing."

Mr. Harborne came to his apparent serenity well into middle age. In a video clip described by The Guardian, he told listeners at a Kamalaya talk that in his late 40s, he'd worked 18-hour days, one after another, fueled by chocolate milk and cookies.

Around that time, a two-seater plane he was piloting crashed into the garden of a couple in Hampshire, England. The couple were unscathed. Mr. Harborne was airlifted to a hospital with serious head injuries.

His politics are not easy to label. There's not a peep in his opinion piece about borders or immigration. Instead, he says his main concerns are artificial intelligence, nuclear war and climate change. As for the £5 million gift, he says that the idea was born in 2019 after witnessing a protester toss a banana milk-shake at Mr. Farage at a campaign stop in Newcastle.

The affront led to his resolve to “support Nigel’s security not just now, but for the rest of his life,” Mr. Harborne told The Telegraph in April. When the gift became public, Mr. Farage told a talk radio show that he might spend the money to protect himself. Or not.

"With all due respect, what's it got to do with you?" he asked the interviewer, a bit indignantly, when asked about his plans for the cash. "I can spend it on Ferraris if I want."

"I WANT A FAIR FIGHT"

Mr. Delo grew up in Oxford, where he was tossed out of three primary schools, The Telegraph reported. (In one, his offense was vandalizing the teachers' toilets.) At age 11, he was diagnosed with Asperger's, a form of autism, which he said made it hard for him to read social cues. Or maybe he likes making mischief. At a formal dinner at Oxford University, from which he graduated in 2005, he once wore a wet suit under his gown, The Times of London reported. The rules said that a suit was required, but didn't offer more specifics.

He's routinely described in the British media as the country's youngest self-made billionaire. Whatever his net worth, which is not an easy number to pin down, his path to riches included one very public setback.

After moving to Hong Kong to work for J.P. Morgan, he co-founded BitMEX, a platform for trading crypto derivatives, in 2014. Six years later, U.S. prosecutors charged him and his co-founders with willfully failing to establish adequate anti-money-laundering and customer-identification controls. In February 2022, Mr. Delo pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and agreed to pay a \$10 million fine. Four months later, he was sentenced to 30 months of probation.

In March 2025, President Trump is-

sued him a full pardon.

"A legal wrong has been righted today," Mr. Delo said in a statement. "I'm pleased to have cleared my name and to be able to continue my life and philanthropic work without the burden of an unfounded conviction."

Mr. Delo has since been on a philanthropic spree. He's reportedly spent more than \$100 million on a variety of charitable causes, from autism to his Oxford alma mater.

His standout venture is known as the Sanctuary, a cross between a WeWork co-working space and a private members club, located in a neo-Gothic building a few steps from Westminster Abbey. There is no sign on the door and those admitted are asked not to post images of the interior.

"It has Chesterfield sofas, old tape-estries depicting medieval scenes,

Champagne, a Fabergé egg, a taxidermy penguin," said Harry Shukman of Hope Not Hate, a British investigative group, who has researched the Sanctuary. "It also has maps of St. Helena, the island on which Napoleon was exiled."

The Sanctuary hosts anti-woke and right-leaning thinkers, podcasters and politicians. Among the politicians is Rupert Lowe, the founder of Restore Britain, a party that has positioned itself as a harder-right alternative to Reform.

"I think he's concerned about the direction that Britain is taking, and that he's doing his bit to try and change that in the way in which he judges it to be best," Mr. Lowe said of Mr. Delo in a phone interview. "I think he's a very good man."

"We are seeing an increasing Americanization of the way in which people are financing politics in the U.K."

In his opinion piece, Mr. Delo said he was “out of the crypto business” and wasn’t donating in the hopes of getting even richer. His passion is the destruction of political correctness, which he once described as a “totalising ideology that’s actually strangling our societies.”

Reform, some believe, is the only party equipped to fight this amorphous enemy. In his opinion piece, Mr. Delo likened the party to a start-up outmatched by entrenched rivals that have been around for hundreds of years.

"One of the reasons why the old parties have lasted so long is that they have made it very expensive to challenge them," he wrote. "I want a fair fight and a level playing field."

"IT'S SORT OF PRICED IN"

The playing field might now tilt the other way. The party plans to hire up to 400 campaign managers for targeted seats across the country.

Mr. Farage also said he wants to build "the best research and policy operation

British politics has ever seen."

Reform plans to spend more than \$13 million building a YouTube-based TV channel and a seven-day digital news-room, staffed by 25 journalists and editors.

That presumes that Reform is able to keep the money.

In March, Labour introduced legislation that would cap political donations from Britons living overseas, and from those newly returned to the country, at £100,000 a year. The law would backdate these restrictions to March 25 and lead to the mother of all clawbacks. If Mr. Delo and Mr. Harborne lived overseas before that March deadline, Reform might have to return virtually all of the £72 million.

Which is why the whereabouts of these men is a pressing national matter.

"We just know that they have complied with the rules and regulations," Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, said in a BBC interview, "both existing and proposed."

The legislation is on track to pass the House of Lords in the coming months, but the fate of the crypto bounty may well end up in court. Win or lose, Mr. Farage will cement his place as Britain's leading populist, the local face of an eth-nonationalist movement surging across Europe.

First, he might need to run for his seat in Clacton yet again. A report by the Parliamentary Commissioner is reportedly imminent, and an adverse decision could lead to a recall petition. Mr. Farage would then have to run a third time for same job. Should he win, a formidable task awaits — convincing voters across the country that he and Reform are ready for power.

"There's no doubt this scandal stuff has damaged him," said Alastair Campbell, a podcaster and the press secretary for former Prime Minister Tony Blair of the Labour Party. "But he's hoping that he can be a bit like Trump, that it's sort of priced in, it's built in. That people will say 'Yeah, Nigel's a character, but let's be honest, they're all corrupt.'"

Vanity, instability, foolishness. Trump blew it.

There was nothing inevitable about this comeuppance.

Christopher Caldwell

Contributing Writer

To fully account for the momentousness of the electoral reversal Republicans have just suffered, we must think back to 12 months ago, when President Trump appeared well positioned to deliver on an ambitious and still-popular agenda.

At that time, Mr. Trump presided over a country at peace and an economy that was growing (if unevenly). By fair means and foul, he had defanged the "deep state" bureaucracy that during his first term had slow-walked and stymied his trade and immigration policies. He had purged the vast United States Agency for International Development, which he suspected of advancing Democratic Party priorities abroad. His Justice Department had neutralized the civil-rights crusaders who opposed his attempts to undo diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He had even made inroads into the country's cultural elite, especially in Silicon Valley, where people spoke of a "vibe shift."

Yes, Mr. Trump had alienated domestic adversaries and foreign allies alike. He had frightened investors with his manic tariff announcements. But he had come within a hair of winning an outright majority in the popular vote in 2024. Almost a year into his second term, his administration was, if not beloved, at least sustainably popular. In late October 2025, there were still a few polls showing his approval rating near 50 percent.

Which is to say, there was nothing inevitable about his comeuppance on Tuesday. Mr. Trump blew it. He was dealt a good hand in 2024 and 2025, but this year — through a mix of vanity, instability and foolishness — he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Some policies that Mr. Trump ran on and brought about — like a tightened border — remain popular. The Center for American Progress, which favors expanded legal immigration and clear pathways to citizenship, found in a poll this past spring that hardened border security was still the migration policy that commanded the most voter support.

In his first term, Mr. Trump also largely won his yearslong argument with the establishment over how mass immigration affects the working class. Contrary to the views of pre-Trump policymakers, immigration to the United States is rarely a win-win proposition; it can help businesses, but often it does so by weakening the bargaining position of native workers. Even the Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton was convinced, writing in March 2024 that he no longer agreed with “the near consensus among economists that immigration to the U.S. was a good thing.”

Why, then, do polls show Mr. Trump with low approval ratings on immigration? Because he chose swagger over rational argument. Instead of allowing his policies to have their effect, he squandered his energy humiliating his opponents. He could have effectively made the case for raids of the sort he ordered in Minnesota: Just as there was a logic to tightening the border, there was a logic to enforcing that tightening in the cities by means of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But this required explaining, and explaining is something Mr. Trump has always been poor at. He is almost allergic to consequentiality and often speaks in a stream of non sequiturs

— perhaps because he fancies himself a master of deal-making, in which granting a connection between two facts is often a sign that one is making a concession.

Mr. Trump and administration officials repeatedly claimed that welfare fraud was rampant among Somalis in Minnesota. It was a splashy justification for raids — but hardly the sober rationale that was needed. When ill-trained officers treated the operation as an

exercise in terrorizing rather than problem-solving, Mr. Trump lost the country.

Similar things happened with his attacks on D.E.I. and political correctness, where Mr. Trump initially had considerable support. After he had changed Justice Department policies, he might simply have let his project jell, until the public got used to a country without invasive enforcement of affirmative action, speech codes and new gender orthodoxies. But he couldn't leave well enough alone. He was like a child playing with his food. He sought to impose his own codes on campus speech, leaving a regime that was qualitatively — but not structurally — different than the censorious one that had existed in the heyday of woke.

This inability to sit still proved calamitous when it came to foreign policy. Mr. Trump's ideas were often sound: Greenland was indeed an important strategic area vulnerable to being co-opted by hostile powers; it was indeed foolish for

Democrats to worry more about Russia than China; countering China's influence on our own hemisphere was indeed a strategic priority; industrial autonomy (whether attained through tariffs or otherwise) was indeed a must.

JAVIER JAÉN

But again, with his insistence on humiliating his interlocutors, Mr. Trump created problems where none had existed. The Canadian conservative Pierre Poilievre looked certain to become prime minister until Mr. Trump began blurting out nonsense about annexing Canada as the 51st state, securing the election for Mark Carney, one of his most determined adversaries on the international stage. Mr. Trump's insistence on besmirching Denmark led to the deployment of non-American NATO troops to Greenland, before resulting, in September, in a security agreement that is no better than what Mr. Trump could have had merely by asking for it at the outset.

Mr. Trump's two worst ideas were the two wars he began against Iran. His poll numbers have never returned to where they were in June 2025, before he joined Israel in a bombing campaign meant to eliminate Iran's nuclear program. When Mr. Trump announced a cease-fire days later, he seemed to have shown an impressive ability to snap out of a delusion. But then came Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28.

That war has penetrated every crevice of the Trump administration, discrediting all of it. It has humiliated the United States not just militarily but also diplomatically. It has weakened the U.S.-Israel alliance and, as a consequence, Israel itself. And it has caused gas and diesel prices to spike, forcing Mr. Trump's supporters to bear the brunt of inflation. Districts and states that went for Mr. Trump by large margins in 2024 shifted away from Republicans across the country.

Mr. Trump's vanity has destroyed his second term. Part of what has made this comeuppance feel more consequential than the one he received during the

midterms of 2018 is that this time around he has been empowered to let that vanity rip. Mr. Trump was able to purge the executive branch of ideological opponents and to elevate his own followers to replace them. He was aided by the Supreme Court's June decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which upheld a more powerful conception of the presidency, greatly weakening the independence of almost all the regulatory agencies.

As far as honoring the idea of the presidency enshrined in the Constitution, the Supreme Court may well have been right to decide as it did — but it seems to have given the public pause. Henceforth, if the presidency is to be given George Washington's prerogatives, the public is going to require of its presidents something more like George Washington's character.

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL the author of "The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties."

A star reporter had AIDS. He turned it into his beat.

Jeffrey Schmalz wrote unsparingly about why the political and medical cavalry would not arrive in time for him.

Maureen Dowd

I was reading the raves for the devastating new movie “Elsinore,” a play-withina-play in which Andrew Scott portrays the Scottish actor Ian Charleson — most famous for “Chariots of Fire.” Charleson unexpectedly gets to take on Hamlet at the National Theater in London in 1989 after Daniel Day-Lewis walks off the stage in the middle of a performance and drops out. Charleson takes on the most daunting role in Shakespeare as he is dying of AIDS.

I thought of Jeffrey Schmalz, the New York Times editor and reporter who took on the role of chronicling the AIDS epidemic for the paper in 1992 — even as the disease was ruining his own

health. Before he died in 1993 at 39, Jeff wrote poignantly — yet unsparingly — about why the political and medical cavalry would not arrive in time for him.

The Scottish actor and the American journalist were about the same age when they died, as AIDS was raging in London and New York and in most large cities around the world. These talented souls were made of sterner stuff than I. The last thing I would do is take a job dwelling on mortality while I was being consumed by a monster. That took enormous courage.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub. Jeff wrote that he had nightmares of waking up in a coffin, even as he held onto a sliver of hope that he would live long enough to see the magic treatment.

I met Jeff when I came to work on the Metro section of The Times in 1983. He was healthy and on top of the world then, and I was intimidated. Everyone could see he was smart, cultured, dapper, acidly funny, brisk and sometimes brusque. His friend and Times colleague David Dunlap captured Jeff's

175

This essay is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times.

jaunty, naughty side beautifully in a eulogy.

After Jeff left the Times Building on West 43rd Street for the last time in 1993, David said they kept “waiting for him to round a corner in the newsroom and come bouncing suddenly toward us, eyebrows arched, mustache bristling, humming one of those vague and forever unfinished show-tune fragments of his, ready to immerse us in whatever may be on his mind, perhaps diverted a moment or two by a handsome face across the floor, followed by an unapologetic ‘Now, where was I?’”

Jeff kindly invited me, the newcomer, to a dinner with colleagues at a fancy restaurant in Manhattan, with so many courses I struggled to keep up. When I came to Albany for a story, Jeff helped me. As the New York Times bureau chief in New York's capital, he was a lordly presence.

In fact, he dominated much of the Statehouse coverage and held his own against Gov. Mario Cuomo, who was charismatic but could be thin-skinned and bullying — a detriment to his political ambitions. Jeff, a sharp but fair political analyst and a great reporter, chronicled his tensions with the press.

"I learned from him how to push back, not be intimidated and that everything is on the record," said Adam Nagourney of The Times, who in those years was covering Albany for The Daily News.

That was on full display when an irritable Cuomo denounced the Albany reporters as “a cabal” out to get him and make him “look bad” and talked about getting retribution by cutting off a reporter who offended him. One night, the governor called Jeff at home.

"You set out to hurt me and you succeeded," he growled at Jeff. "I hope you sleep well."

The next morning, according to Jeff, "the 54-year-old governor called back to apologize, asking forgiveness for 'an old man with a bad back.'

FRED R. CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jeffrey Schmalz in 1991.

In other words, he seemed like the ideal Times man, destined to become DOWD, PAGE 10

The New York Times

INTERNATIONAL EDITION

A.G. SULZBERGER Publisher

JOSEPH KAHN Executive Editor

MARC LACEY Managing Editor

CAROLYN RYAN Managing Editor

SUZANNE DALEY Associate Editor

KATHLEEN KINGSBURY Opinion Editor

MEREDITH KOPIT LEVIEN Chief Executive Officer

MICHAEL GREENSPON Senior V.P. and General Manager

HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS V.P., International Circulation

HELENA PHUA Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific

SUZANNE YVERNÈS International Chief Financial Officer

Why we've banned bots from our dating apps

Spencer Rascoff

For the last few years, the tech industry has been busy determining how to incorporate artificial intelligence into our apps, websites and services. Usually, it's there to do something tech has long done: reduce friction for people.

That was the purpose behind building railroads, telephone networks and computers, and making it possible to buy airline tickets or to research houses on a computer. Technology could make life easier and reduce the number of steps taken to get something done.

Before they became part of Match Group, modern dating apps like Tinder and Hinge were founded with a similar goal in mind: take some of the friction out of dating. Now, people are debating whether A.I. agents should be used to remove friction altogether. Or is some friction good, and even necessary, for creating better experiences and maintaining authenticity?

At Match Group, we decided we don't want A.I. agents to take over the functions of our dating apps, not even if they

A.I. agents can make things easier. That's not always a good thing.

are representing real people. We want to ensure humans are reviewing other humans' dating profiles and sending messages to other users on our apps. That's why we have put in place guard-

rails meant to prevent the use of A.I. agents on our platforms, like Tinder and Hinge.

I don't expect every company that has an online platform to make the same decision about A.I. agents, nor do I think that would be prudent. But at a time when there is such a rapid push for companies to open their doors to A.I. agents, we're urging our peers to slow down a bit and think twice about what is best for their companies and the people who use their products.

In certain cases, we think it will be important for companies to prevent the encroachment of A.I. agents into their platforms. Because, in those cases, friction may really be necessary to make people's experiences with tech more enriching and meaningful.

A.I. agents are systems that can autonomously run tasks — say, automatically respond to email or plan and book a weeklong vacation. They have the potential to bring enormous convenience to our lives. Meta's Muse has been downloaded more than 10 million times, and the number of people using A.I. assistants from companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google is growing quickly.

Now, all people can decide how much friction to remove from their lives. Do they want to call the dental insurance company themselves, or have their agent do it? Do they want to have their agent book a hotel, buy paper towels from Walmart or select and message a potential romantic partner?

Other companies are already weighing in on the use of Muse and other A.I. agents. Amazon has decided to block them, most likely in part to protect its huge advertising business, which depends on human eyes. Brian Chesky, chief executive of Airbnb, pointed out that his company is all about human experiences and that its platform is photo-forward so vacationers can visualize and dream.

I can't speak to every company's calculus, but ours at Match Group was pretty simple. If we let people use their A.I. agents to message potential dates on our apps, there's a pretty low chance they'll actually connect authentically, and, eventually, in person.

We know the ingredients of a good relationship: patience, vulnerability and effort, and all these need practice. I don't think our users will benefit from avoiding the uncomfortable questions of

"What should I say next? Will they respond to that message?" It's part of the excitement of the journey, and essential to learning what you want from a date or a partner.

Our users have also told us in no uncertain terms what they want, and where they draw a line. Our research shows that nearly two-thirds of singles see A.I. helping their dating journey, but when it comes to A.I. replacing the deeply human side of connection, rejection is near universal.

I've heard from other tech executives that they aren't allowing agents on their platforms "for now" to preserve their communities' authenticity. But business leaders like myself have to set strong boundaries between acceptable convenience and keeping some of the work (and power) in people's hands. We need to do it thoughtfully, always considering our users and their safety. That judgment call is going to have consequences for everyone.

I worry that too many of us are treating A.I. adoption as a race, where the only risk is moving too slowly. Yet there are also real consequences to moving too fast. The temptation to inject A.I. into just about everything is growing, but it could end up stripping away the experiences that made our businesses valuable to our users in the first place. We need to ask the uncomfortable question: Is making something easier always a good thing?

SPENCER RASCOFF is the chief executive of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, Hinge and dozens of other dating apps.

A star reporter had AIDS. He turned it into his beat.

Marchers at the 1987 Gay Pride Parade in New York City.

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jeffrey Schmalz works on The Times Stylebook with colleague Eileen Butler.

TERESA ZABALA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

DOWD, FROM PAGE 9

executive editor one day, while I felt inadequate, without a glossy pedigree or an Ivy League degree. I agonized over the right way to dress for The Gray Lady and ended up wearing a preppy sweater with a duck on it to the news-room on my first day. I still shudder when I think about it.

UNEASE IN THE NEWSROOM

It was only after he died that I realized Jeff had not had a glide path to The Times, either. He came from Willow Grove, a suburb north of Philadelphia. When he was 2, his father — an alcoholic — and his mother separated. His mother got a job at Sears and raised Jeff and his sister, Wendy, with help from her parents and siblings. Jeff went to Columbia University on a scholarship. Just as I had once worked the night shift as a clerk at The Washington Star, Jeff worked the night shift as a copy boy at The Times and dropped out of school when he got a promotion to copy editor.

The gifted gay men who surrounded me in The Times's newsroom were cloaked to varying degrees because of the unease of Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger, the publisher, and Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor, about gays. Rosenthal banned the word "gay" from The Times — a rule reversed only after Max Frankel took over in 1986 — and the paper was slow to give gay rights and AIDS the coverage they deserved.

As Nagourney revealed in his excellent history of the paper, “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism,” Rosenthal wrote in his journal that though he would hire a homosexual as a critic, he would not put one on a sensitive beat like the Pentagon or City Hall.

"The homosexual clique was a problem," Rosenthal wrote, "because it was usually subterranean, which gave it a kind of conspiracy atmosphere, and because homosexuals in the clique always were convinced or tried to convince themselves that they were wiser, more acute, 'better' than the others — the old breed."

Jeff's friend and fellow reporter in those years, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (Punch's son), agreed with me that Jeff seemed like the epitome of what a Times journalist should be.

"I always thought he represented so much that reflected the best about The Times — from his journalistic integrity to his commitment to making sure we were both detailed and accurate," Sulzberger told me. "And he was a lovely colleague to work with.

"The greatest sadness was, he was with us at a time when he had to hide so much of his personal life to protect his career. It's a blessing that those days are long gone."

Jeff told his friends that he was sorry he had stayed in the closet so long (even though it was fairly well known that he was gay).

"Not only did Jeff disguise himself in the 1970s — when the social landscape at The Times was as inviting as a bomb crater," Dunlap said. "But he did so through the 1980s, as well, when lesbians and gay men at The Times were encouraged by the new leadership to believe they were not just tolerated but welcome."

As Dunlap recounted, Jeff apologized: "I came very late to this fight, and have borne an incredible guilt complex because of that. And I'm sorry."

After he had a seizure in the news-room in 1990 and discovered that he had AIDS, he came back transformed. He asked Frankel if he could write about AIDS and gay issues, and became a

pioneer — for The Times, and for journalism.

Adam Moss, an editor who was advising the newsroom, sat next to Jeff in “a kind of gay ghetto alcove in the newsroom” when he came back after his collapse. “I was witness as he shed any trace of the neutrality he’d spent a career assuming, got angrier and more impassioned about what was happening to him,” Moss told me. “I marveled at his ability to be furious and buoyant at the same time his life was closing in.”

'THE PRISM OF AIDS'

I wasn't sure at the time whether being a blend of activist and journalist would work. It was something the newspaper had never allowed and still does not today. Jeff wasn't sure, either. He knew the anger of activists mirrored his own.

"Now I see the world through the prism of AIDS," he wrote in a Times essay titled "Covering AIDS and Living It: A Reporter's Testimony." "I feel an obligation to those with AIDS to write about it and an obligation to the newspaper to write what just about no other reporter in America can cover in quite the same way."

He wrote: "Some people think that it is the journalism that suffers, that objectivity is abandoned. But they are wrong. If the reporters have any integrity at all, it is they who suffer, caught between two allegiances."

He made up for lost time. Along with Randy Shilts, who wrote "And the Band Played On" and was covering the epidemic for The San Francisco Chronicle, he became the brains and face of AIDS coverage. "To have AIDS is to be alone, no matter the number of friends and family members around," Schmalz wrote.

He spent his days talking to scientists and politicians, and to other men and women living with H.I.V. and AIDS — sometimes celebrities like Magic Johnson and Elizabeth Glaser — about their fear of death, their constant monitoring of their T cells, their trepidation that every cold might be the cold that would do them in, their humiliation at being pariahs, their rage at the slow progress on finding a cure. And then Jeff would go home to his Upper West Side apartment and deal with his own roller coast-

er of "horror, hope, hope, horror" and his fear that he wouldn't wake up the next morning.

Schmalz became the brains and face of AIDS coverage. "To have AIDS is to be alone, no matter the number of friends and family members around," he wrote.

Jeff acknowledged this fear in that essay, which he composed feverishly even as his own fevers returned: "As I write this, I feel tired but sharp. The AZT is holding for now. The brain infection,

though diminished, is still present, making the fingers of my right hand stiff and clumsy on the keyboard. I use a tape recorder; my short-term memory isn't what it was."

One of the first stories I wrote at The Times in 1983 was about a buddy system set up by the Gay Men's Health Crisis, finding volunteers who would visit dying AIDS patients — often neglected by friends and family — in the hospital.

I interviewed Larry Kramer, the writer and AIDS activist, at his apartment in Greenwich Village.

Kramer, who went on to write “The Normal Heart,” a play and later film about the early days of the epidemic, read me the names of 37 of his friends who had died, logged in a small green notebook.

"Can't something be done?" he keened. "The rest of the city, my straight friends, go on with life as usual and I'm in the middle of an epidemic. We're dying. Why is this happening? Is it because we loved each other too much or not enough? I just don't know."

I thought about taking on AIDS as a beat because the paper didn't seem to be focusing on the scourge, even though it was rampaging through New York City. But I ended up being assigned to Washington, where they also weren't focusing on it much.

Like other gay men and lesbians — many of whom woke up from political apathy — Jeff pinned a lot of hope on Bill Clinton, who mentioned AIDS in his 1992 victory speech. But after the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” fiasco, Clinton grew wary of gay issues, and Jeff grew wary of Clinton.

Jeff was also astute about Tony Fauci. "Being the Government's point man on AIDS has made Tony Fauci (rhymes with OUCH-ee) famous," Jeff wrote. "He professes to be solely the scientist. But in fact, he is very much the star and the politician, one year defending modest Reagan-Bush AIDS budget proposals as adequate, the next defending generous Clinton proposals as necessary. He is the activist's enemy — 'Murderer!' Kramer once called him in an essay published in The Village Voice. He is the activist's friend, a comrade in arms, showing up last October at the opening of the Kramer play wearing a red AIDS ribbon."

ACLARION CALL

In his final essay, Jeff admitted he was bitter. "I am dying," he wrote. "Why doesn't someone help us?"

"Let's face it, a miracle isn't going to happen," he continued. "One day soon I will simply become one of the 90 people in America to die that day of AIDS. It's like knowing I will be killed by a speeding car, but not knowing when or where."

Moss and Nagourney helped stitch together that dynamite final essay as Jeff lay dying, and it was published in the magazine in November 1993, after he was gone. "It had significant impact because his expression was so personal and felt," Moss said.

The cocktail for AIDS that saved lives was still two years away. Jeff was the last infected friend I had who died before that cocktail arrived, and that was horrible.

"I usually say that my epitaph is not a phrase but the body of my work," he wrote. "I am writing it with each article, including this one. But actually, there is a phrase that I want shouted at my funeral and written on the memorial cards, a phrase that captures the mix of cynicism and despair that I feel right now and that I will almost certainly take to my grave: Whatever happened to AIDS?"

Now we come to a moment when H.I.V. diagnoses in New York City have seen a slight uptick, mainly in low-income neighborhoods. As I reread Jeff's fierce, illuminating stories, filled with remarkable reporting and remarkably little self-pity, I am proud of him.

While others were cringing away, he was documenting the despair and failures and cowardice and bravery and honesty and denial, creating an epic account of those plague years. He offered a cri de coeur from a heart that was breaking, echoing into the present moment: Attention must be paid.

NICK LITTLE

American voters have protected their democracy

LINDA E. KREPLIN, COLUMBIA, MD.

EDITORIAL BOARD. FROM PAGE 1

Election workers did their jobs this year in the face of relentless pressure from Mr. Trump. He has long claimed that widespread fraud decides American elections, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Election workers across party lines responded to these lies by doing their jobs as diligently as they long have, helping people cast their ballots and counting those ballots.

In many states, election officials took specific actions to stop interference from the Trump administration. Last year, the Justice Department demanded that states provide the federal government with voters' birth dates, driver's license information and partial Social Security numbers. Officials, including several Republicans, refused to comply.

Among the standouts were Utah's Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson; Michigan's Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson; and West Virginia's Republican secretary of state, Kris Warner. Each refused to comply, each drew a lawsuit from the administration, and each won in court.

Their ability to resist the president underscores an advantage of America's decentralized government. They could refuse because the president has no power to overrule them. The elections clause of the Constitution lets each state decide how its elections are run. This federalism proved a bulwark against Mr. Trump's authoritarian instincts.

A second group that stood up for democracy this year were legal advocates. When Mr. Trump tried to interfere in the elections — through executive orders that sought to complicate voter registration, bar states from counting some mail and direct the Postal Service to decide which voters would receive mail ballots — advocates quickly responded by filing lawsuits.

The advocates included the Brennan Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and Democratic attorneys general. Some prestigious law firms have been afraid of confronting the Trump administration's legal abuses over the past two years, making the work of nonprofits all the more important.

The lawsuits frequently succeeded because of the third group: federal judges who insisted on following the law and upholding the Constitution despite intimidation efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies. Judges appointed by presidents from both parties, including Mr. Trump himself, blocked key parts of the executive orders concerning election rules. In 27 straight district court rulings, judges rejected the Justice Department's demands for state voter rolls.

The Supreme Court deserves both credit and criticism. The court was wrong to issue rulings that made possible Mr. Trump's extreme partisan gerrymandering and his administration's efforts to create a national voter database. But the justices did act to protect Americans' ability to cast votes this fall. In September, it upheld a

lower-court ruling that barred the Postal Service from taking steps that could have restricted mail voting.

That ruling was a reminder that this court does have its red lines about elections. After the 2020 election, the justices refused to hear cases with Mr. Trump's false claims about election fraud. The justices may need to swat down similar claims in the weeks ahead.

But the challenges ahead should not overshadow what Americans accomplished. This year, election workers, lawyers and judges defended the rules that protect the vote. And tens of millions of Americans went to the polls to exercise their most fundamental democratic right. Americans showed that the power to choose their leaders belongs to them. Now they must remain vigilant until officials certify every race and the winners take office.

THE EDITORIAL BOARD is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

STYLE

His photos just keep turning up

It seems that Szilveszter Mako has shot every magazine cover this year

BY LINDSAY GELLMAN

Sandra Bullock has posed for dozens of magazine covers over the course of her Hollywood career. But a cover shoot this year felt different. For this one, there was no wind machine, no slinky, backless number.

Instead, styled in a modest plaid dress, Bullock was invited to step into an olive-green diorama and handed a broom.

Behind the camera for the unusual shoot for Interview magazine was Szilveszter Mako, a Hungarian photographer whose painterly portraits inspired by his home country's folklore have lately become inescapable in the fashion world and on social media.

On Instagram recently, Jo Ellison, the editor of How to Spend It, the Financial Times's glossy style magazine, posted a collage of Mako's covers of Bullock, Emma Corrin, Gigi Hadid, Hunter Schafer and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Those came out in just the last few months. "How many more covers is Szilveszter Mako doing this season?" she wrote.

A few days later, American Vogue unveiled its November cover star: Jenna Ortega, photographed by Mako. Then came Alicia Keys for Vogue Italia.

The attention is “kind of unbelievable,” Mako, who is based in Milan, said during a visit to New York City in September. “I never imagined that there actually will be this much interest.”

His magazine covers and brand campaigns are quickly recognizable for a collection of motifs: painted fish, flames, utensils and a dark cabin, to name a few. The images are muted and surreal: Elle Fanning, for the digital platform Who What Wear, in a voluminous dress, served on a giant dinner plate; Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York City in part of her cover shoot for the Cut, standing in exaggerated pointy pumps beside an illustrated cat and chair that look as if they had leaped out of “Good-night Moon.”

"You step into Szilveszter's brain when you step onto his set," Bullock wrote in an email. "And that world was painted and constructed long before I showed up."

The images have broken through, as some people have grown tired of seeing flawless celebrity faces against seamless backdrops. More and more, people crave texture, personality and signs of slight imperfection — even if these, too, have been painstakingly and deliberately created. This explains why Mako, 35, with his idiosyncratic tastes, is seemingly as booked and busy as Juergen Teller or Annie Leibovitz.

"There's an interest in flatness and painting and drawing in his work, which is in some ways not photographic," said Emily Keegin, a photo editor and creative consultant who has directed magazine cover shoots featuring Ariana Grande and SZA. "And I think that aligns with where we are as a reaction to A.I. and a distaste for anything that's hyperdigital."

SZILVESZTER MAKO, VOGUE

Mako has become so well known for what Keegin calls his “heavy fingerprint” that in September he opened “Bauhaus Ballet,” an immersive experience in downtown Manhattan. The temporary exhibition, akin to the sort dedicated to van Gogh and Klimt, invited fans to step inside his sets.

As celebrities, actors and members of the fashion world began to file in for the opening reception, they were offered glasses of Champagne by a row of hands protruding from behind curtains.

YE FAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

SZILVESZTER MAKO, ELLE

Further inside, Mako was still making tweaks, pacing one of the galleries with a plastic bag of Kentucky bluegrass seed, which he sprinkled along the base of rustic plantings meant to evoke the Hungarian countryside.

Mako, who tends to avoid interviews unless they are conducted as written ex-

The fashion photographer Szilveszter Mako, above, in September at “Bauhaus Ballet,” an exhibition of his work in Manhattan. His recent magazine covers, some of which are shown left, have been described as painterly portraits.

His imagery is quickly recognizable for motifs that include painted fish, flames, utensils and a dark cabin.

changes, hesitated at first to speak with a New York Times reporter in person. But a couple days after the opening reception, he was back in the gallery space, ready for a conversation.

When it comes to creating images, "we are fighting always for perfection," Mako said. "Everything needs to be the best possible. But there are limitations."

As an audio recording of the actress Gwendoline Christie reading a translation of a 19th-century Hungarian poem played on a loop, a line stretched down the block to get into the exhibition, which was produced with the Cultivist, an organization for art enthusiasts, and Capital One.

Some visitors who filtered in recognized Mako, who on this day had a neat beard and a maroon baseball cap, and lingered nearby to eavesdrop.

Growing up in Lillafured, Hungary, Mako spent two years attending a Waldorf school, where he learned to sew his own clothes and tend to plants and animals. Versions of his childhood home, a cabin of wattle and daub painted a dark brown, appear in some of his portraits as a statement headpiece.

Early on, Mako said, he thought he might become a painter. But he had a formative experience while spending time in his mother's hair salon, where he learned how to do edgy "emo" cuts that he then photographed and posted on Myspace.

Rather than photograph his subjects in the salon, Mako remembered telling them: “‘Your hair was iconic. Let’s go to the cemetery or the railway.’”

"That was what we had," he added. "The chicken coop."

That background touched off a yen for experimental images. He began booking shoots with fashion models who were just starting out, first in Hungary, then in Berlin and Milan, where he settled in 2013.

"It's very easy to shoot beautiful models," Mako said. But he was more drawn to distinctive faces from smaller modeling agencies. As a college student, he studied photography but also took psychology courses.

Mako said his "first big break" came three years ago, when GQ Italia asked him to photograph the actor Willem

Dafoe for the magazine's December 2023 "Men of the Year" issue. He put Dafoe in one of his house headpieces and posed the actor stooping in a box with a pillow and a spoon.

Mako prefers to work with tangible objects, as opposed to relying on computer-generated effects. He has come to realize that lots of other people like that, too.

"I learned in the last few years that people do appreciate the materialism," he said, "the fact that, actually, these things are existing." (Mako said he used digital photo-editing tools but would not generate imagery from nothing.)

In an email, Anya Taylor-Joy, who did a cover shoot with Mako in May, said she liked how the "2-D becomes tactile" in his images.

There have been some creative differences. When Mako photographed the performance artist Marina Abramovic last year, she came away frustrated. "He only wanted to do his ideas and vision that he prepared beforehand," she said. "He didn't realize that I am an artist, and I don't want to be directed with no possibility for collaboration of my own." When reached later for comment, Mako described himself as a longtime admirer of her work.

"He was upset I didn't want to put my head in a box, as everyone else had done," Abramovic added.

It's rare for Mako's subject to be a visual artist, too, with a competing aesthetic vision. But Abramovic also touched on a criticism of Mako's work that has grown louder as his photography has become more ubiquitous.

After Ortega's Vogue cover hit social media, some figures in the art and fashion worlds bristled at the familiarity of the image. Egregious to some was also that in other photos, Ortega appeared in the same turquoise feathered dress that Hadid had worn in a spread for WSJ Magazine. "I need to collaborate with my stylists," Mako said later by email. "If they like a piece, I will shoot it."

There is something paradoxical about the criticism, according to Elizabeth Goodspeed, an art director and a designer. "Mako is being commissioned precisely because his photographs look the way they do; expecting each new job to suddenly look different is like commissioning Yayoi Kusama to paint stripes," she wrote in a recent essay. "It's fine to let Mako be Mako!"

Ellison, the How to Spend It editor, reflected on this, too, in an essay titled "The Curse of Overexposure."

Mako, who still feels new to the spotlight, said the harsh comments on social media were "heartless."

"I have, yes, a very distinctly particular way of how I take the pictures," he said. "But for me, they don't look the same."

Mako insists that he has not yet fully established his visual language and that his style will continue to evolve. "They just need to be a little bit patient with me," he added, "and give me some time."

There is rarely a stretch when Mako is not working or traveling, sometimes staying up all night, he said, to meet deadlines. A day off in Milan would probably find him at home in bed with his 9-year-old cat, Needle, shutters closed, rewatching "Harry Potter" movies or "The Queen's Gambit."

But, never one to be satisfied, he said he dreamed of photographing Tilda Swinton. He doubts, though, that he will ever feel the validation he craves: from his relatives, from former grade-school classmates, he said. This is partly because the world that his megawatt-star subjects inhabit does not easily translate to life back home. It's also because Mako is a vicious critic of himself.

"The things that I really want, I will never have," he said. "So it's already a lost cause. Like being beautiful. I always wanted that."

Are color trends a mere coincidence?

Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times's fashion director, answers readers' fashion-related questions. You can send her a question at openthread@nytimes.com or via X: @vvfriedman. Questions are edited and condensed.

Do brands and designers get together and make a decision about what the predominate color of any fashion season will be? Brown seems to be in the lead this autumn with pops of purple and red. It's so prevalent that it's hard to imagine it's a coincidence. Is there an explanation? — Linda, Los Angeles

You are not the only person who wonders this — and it is a mystery not limited to shoppers. Even fashion insiders sometimes scratch their heads.

Henry Zankov, the founder of a namesake line and the artistic director of the reinvented Diane von Furstenberg label, told me that when he was in design school, he had wondered the same thing. And Joseph Altuzarra, the founder of a namesake brand, said that sometimes he looked at collections during fashion week and thought, "Oh damn, they're doing the same color or same type of print as me."

What everyone is essentially wondering is whether there is a real-life equivalent of the famous "cerulean blue" speech that Miranda Priestly gives in the original "The Devil Wears Prada." You know, the one in which "Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent — wasn't it? — who showed cerulean military jackets. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores —

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMBARASHE CHA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

And the answer is: sort of.

There is absolutely no official collusion, no late-night cabals a month before the fashion season where designers get together and, sotto voce, identify a shade that they have not used for a while and agree to bring

back so that everyone will feel a need to buy new stuff.

But two things are going on that could activate the spidey senses of conspiracy-minded fashion watchers among us. One is quite straightforward, and one is a little more systemic.

First, the obvious factor. As Al-tuzarra explained it: "We're all seeing the same shows, the same movies. We're all steeped in similar culture."

In other words, if there's a big Yves Klein show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre, designers, who are deeply enmeshed in the art and entertainment worlds, would probably see it. A number of them might come away with a sudden interest in Yves Klein blue.

Similarly, if the biggest film talker is a thriller that takes place in the former Soviet Union, the snowy gray shades of a concrete gulag might capture their imaginations. It is why, to go back to "The Devil Wears Prada," "florals for spring," groundbreaking though it is not, does, in fact, happen every year.

I know this may be disappointing (aren't designers supposed to be super-inventive and original?!), but that doesn't make it any less true — particularly these days, when creativity is forced to take place on such a fast schedule. It's little wonder that designers have to latch on to the first source of inspiration they see.

The second factor is more behind the scenes.

About a year before they start on a collection, most designers — or their teams — attend the major fabric fairs, such as Paris Première Vision and Pitti Immagine Filati in Florence, Italy. Mills and manufacturers take booths at these fairs to show their new tweeds, a fresh shade of purple and so on.

"You go and the Chanel team is there and the Dior team and the Chloé team," Altuzarra said.

That means, said Kim Jones, the former men's wear designer for Louis Vuitton and Dior, and the former women's wear designer for Fendi, who is starting his own line, "Everyone uses the same fabric mills, and a lot of the same fabric developers work across a few companies."

Then, because “clients gravitate toward certain things, the mills think, ‘Oh, everyone loves these tweed developments,’ and suddenly we see a lot more tweed,” Altuzarra said. Or russet, or grape.

It becomes a vicious, or virtuous, cycle: Mills show something new or exciting; designers seem interested; mills make more variations of that fabric, which makes it seem even more au courant; a slew of designers decide to use it in their next collections; Pantone, a designator of the color of the year, takes note and . . . voilà!

Suddenly you see [fill in the blank] color or sequined yarn in stores everywhere. VANESSA FRIEDMAN

nytimes.com/subscribeinternational

[Sports] He's Formula 1's youngest world champion

Above from left: Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli, top, with Red Bull's Max Verstappen, left, and Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton after he secured the Formula 1 world championship in Mexico City on Sunday; and during the race.

EDUARDO VERDUGO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

With a fearless approach, Kimi Antonelli dominated much of the 2026 season

BY MADELINE COLEMAN

THE ATHLETIC

Kimi Antonelli's Formula 1 coronation came after a fever.

Antonelli, the 20-year-old Mercedes driver who dominated much of the 2026 campaign, fought through illness and sleepless nights in Mexico City but still finished third in Sunday's grand prix, securing the season title.

At 20 years and 2 months old, Antonelli is the youngest champion in F1 history, surpassing the record set by Sebastian Vettel in 2010 when he won his first title aged 23 years and 134 days. Antonelli also ended Italy's 73-year drought, becoming the country's first champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953.

Antonelli said he had come down with "a high fever and stomach problems" in the days before the Mexico City Grand Prix. He was competitive in practice but never set the fastest time.

After a midrace pass on Charles Leclerc following a long red flag during Sunday's race, Antonelli celebrated his first F1 title on the podium with two of the sport's greats: Lewis Hamilton, who finished second, and Max Verstappen, who won.

The race engineer Peter Bonnington cheered over the radio: "Get in there, Kimi! Champion of the world!" Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, said: "Kimi, we did it! World champion, we did it!"

As Antonelli got out of the car, he was met with hugs by his family, Hamilton, Verstappen and the Mercedes team. After they sprayed champagne in their podium celebration, the top three finishers gathered for a photo. Antonelli held the Italian flag, and Verstappen and Hamilton lifted him on their shoulders.

Speaking in the stadium section of the track, Antonelli thanked his competitors for the moment and said it was "truly incredible" to share the podium with Hamilton and Verstappen.

Antonelli seized control of the 2026 championship early in the season, winning five consecutive races in the opening six rounds. He won nine races overall and stood on the podium 16 times across 19 race weekends.

He had rated his campaign an 8.5 out of 10 ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, citing many moments that had gone wrong, like when he ran wide beyond the track's edges during the Miami sprint race and during qualifying in Barcelona and Austria.

Exceeding track limits remained a threatening habit as the season progressed. Still, Antonelli kept his commanding lead in the championship, steadily building it as his teammate,

George Russell, the preseason title favorite, watched his challenge fall apart for myriad reasons, including bad luck, mechanical issues and driver errors.

The United States Grand Prix was the first time Antonelli was in a position to clinch the title, though it seemed like a long shot as the weekend wore on. To secure his first world championship in Texas, Antonelli needed to win and for Russell to finish ninth or lower and Hamilton fifth or lower.

Nearly everything swung in Antonelli's favor that day. Wolff hailed Antonelli's win as "the race of a champion who isn't the champion yet" and "the best race that he's delivered so far." But Hamilton finished fourth, and Russell eighth.

In Mexico City, 2 points stood in Antonelli's way, but Russell and Hamilton could still have pushed the title decision to Brazil. To seal the deal this past weekend, Antonelli needed to finish ninth or higher, regardless of where Russell and Hamilton sat. If Antonelli had finished 10th, he would have needed his teammate, Russell, not to win. If he had finished outside the top 10, he would have needed neither Russell nor Hamilton to win.

Hamilton and Russell started the Mexico City Grand Prix on the front row, and Antonelli was fourth after Verstappen's one-place grid drop.

After qualifying, Antonelli told reporters that it had not “been an easy weekend” for him, adding that he had “been a bit more tense than usual.” He still felt “very tired” and had not recovered from his illness by Saturday night. He had not been sleeping well over the weekend and said he had been “aware that definitely I haven’t been driving well.” During qualifying, he said, he did not feel he had put a clean lap together, making sporadic mistakes.

With the title within Antonelli's reach, the outside chatter added to the weight on his shoulders.

Antonelli said on Saturday that he had been trying to shut out the talk of clinching the title as he worked through his illness.

The Mini Crossword

11/5/2026

BY TRACY BENNETT

EDITED BY JOEL FAGLIANO

ACROSS

1 Experimental and provocative

5 "Top Chef" alum \_\_ Hall

6 Once more

7 Throw ... or a protection for an injured arm

8 Something a camper sets up

DOWN

1 Keen-eyed bird of prey

2 "You Can Never Go Down the \_" (Mister Rogers song for kids afraid of bath time)

3 Flash of light

5 Throw ... or a protection for an injured arm

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE

Two Not Touch

Put two stars in each row, column and region of the grid. No two stars may touch, not even diagonally.

Copyright © 2024 www.krazydad.com

Cryptogram

JLIITJJZLU KLW YLCKUT XBOGD ZBGC QVFTG: "THTGDWYOFS O YBHT, O QVT WQ LXXTGJ."

PUZZLE BY BEN BASS

YESTERDAY'S ANSWER 1.Wednesday 2. Cosmopolitan or colada 3. Shrimp 4. Cheddar 5. Latin, Latvian or Lao

KenKen

Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.

Crossword | Edited by Will Shortz

ACROSS

1\_\_\_\_ Batlló,

Antoni Gaudí

masterpiece

whose roof

arch mimics a

dragon's back

5 Cheese that

comes from

northern Italy

(and not another

continent!)

11 Tote, for one

14 Certain sports

bet

15 You can see right

through it

16 Subject of the

2024 Nobel Prize

in Physiology or

Medicine

17 Hand-held

communication

devices

19 Pioneers, in hip-

hop slang

20 D.O.J. branch

21 Online chat sign-

off

22 Pottery needs

24 It accompanies

a promotion,

typically

26 Songs played on

an oldies station

30 Word after pipe

or before team

31 Canal site

32 Book of the Bible that includes doings of Cyrus the Great

33 Whistle blower, informally

35 Disapproving sounds

38 Sound after a gut punch

39 Admission of confusion ... or a hint for interpreting four answers in this puzzle

44 Flying off the shelves

45 Author Morrison

46 Political leader?

47 Gray matter?

49 Sea urchin, on a sushi menu

51 Women's dress shoes

55 Juggernauts

58 Buy a round for, say

59 Like the alphabet of the circled letters in the Down answers, but not in the Across answers

60 Junior's Jr.

62 Way to go: Abbr.

63 Voice, as grievances

64 Popular fund- raising event

PUZZLE BY DAVID P. WILLIAMS

68 Vehicle for taking a trip?

69 The smallest of samples

70 Ampere or volt

71 Symbols on a post

72 Governor Gavin

73 Head honcho

DOWN

1 Hardly a risk-taker

2 A gamer may use one

3 One might be taken with a stick

4 U.S. state with the most dry counties: Abbr.

5 Feeling tender

6 Comfort

7 Peeve

8 Nickname of the protagonist in 2024's "Anora"

9 Enthusiasts, so to speak

10 Refueling spot

11 Big Apple menagerie

12 0.1 nanometer

13 Super-fun time

18 Salt for wintry roads

23 More than just exaggerate

25 Singer Bareilles

27 Place to go, in the army

28 British bottom

29 Call made with outstretched arms

34 Rock duo & Eddie

36 Center of a beer blast

37 Unlikely buyer?

39 Restaurant chain with a smiling face in its logo

40 Where things get ticked off

41 Cruise ship workers

42 Wildebeests

43 Go on the road

48 Solidify

50 Digs

52 \_\_\_\_ wool

53 Vernacular

54 Medical inserts

56 Galileo, for one

57 Get together

61 Couple

63 In the manner of

65 What a bill may become

66 Letter indicating ownership?

67 Large popcorn purchase

Play all of our games plus over 10,000 past puzzles for Wordle, Spelling Bee, The Crossword and more online at http://nytimes.com/games. For puzzle talk, visit http://nytimes.com/wordplay.

The British ‘S.N.L.’ finds its voice

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

“Saturday Night Live U.K.” has featured, clockwise from top left, Jack Shep as Princess Diana, Ania Magliano and Paddy Young in “Weekend Update,” George Fouracres as the “great big crab man,” and Fouracres on his own.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SKY TV

Sending up the royals is among many ways the spinoff has set itself apart

BY CAROLINE DARYA FRAMKE

When “Saturday Night Live U.K.” premiered in March, it was fair to assume it would follow the same rhythms and traditions that have defined Saturday nights on American TV for over half a century. Deviating from its norms can still be risky for the original “S.N.L.,” let alone a spinoff born in its shadow.

Accordingly, the first episode began with a politically timely cold open. A live band played sketches on and off-stage, with a brief break for Weekend Update. Its first host was Tina Fey.

From the moment its cast first shouted, "Live from London, it's Saturday night!," watching it has felt like spying on a parallel universe full of potential.

Yes, the show belongs to the "S.N.L." brand (so yes, it is also executive produced by Lorne Michaels). But without 50 years of history, this version gets to start somewhat fresh. The only question was how different it would — or could — become.

Seven months later, the show has established itself as more than just an experiment. It has tweaked formats and landed scathing punchlines. It has leaned into its Britishness with bits like a sketch introducing King Charles to a “Deeply Intelligent, Autonomous, Neurokinetic Android” (a.k.a. DIANA). The bones might look familiar, but the cast and writers have brought “Saturday Night Live” to life in a way all their own.

Now in its second season, the show is on hiatus until January. (All episodes are available to stream on Peacock.) In the meantime, here are five moments that demonstrate how it found its voice.

"45 SECONDS WITH GEORGE FOURACRES" TRUSTING THE CAST

An early indication of the trust “S.N.L. U.K.” has in its cast arrived in the waning minutes of the series premiere. Known in the United States as the “10 to 1” slot (as in “10 minutes to 1 a.m.”), this sliver of airtime is typically reserved for the night’s most off-kilter material.

Even with that in mind, "45 Seconds With George Fouracres" is still a delightfully weird surprise. Entrusted with the first episode's last word, Fouracres asks and answers the same question — "WHAT kind of Irish is your grandad?" — in a giddy, looping song. His escalating frenzy of hyper-local accents is as startling as it is hilarious. It also proves the benefit of drawing talent from sources other than comedy clubs; Fouracres's other claim to fame is his prolific work with Shakespeare's Globe theater.

"WEEKEND UPDATE"

GOING FOR THE JUGULAR

Taking on such a signature "S.N.L." segment must have been intimidating for the anchors Ania Magliano and

Paddy Young, but they rarely show any nerves. Their ability to tear the British establishment to shreds with matter-of-fact smiles was immediate and impressive. (It's also frankly just refreshing to see a different pair behind the Weekend Update desk at all; Colin Jost and Michael Che are on their 12th year and counting.)

The British Weekend Update punch-lines consistently go viral. Their boldness even extends to scolding their parent show, as Magliano did the week after Shane Gillis's clumsy monologue back in New York.

Still, this Weekend Update is maybe most interesting for its willingness to experiment with the form. If Young flubs a joke, he might glare underneath the desk, where he'd once revealed a pit full of cowering writers. Magliano has left the studio via airlift. In the

recent midseason finale, the segment ended with a fake medical emergency, prompting a sad piano riff and abrupt cut to commercial. In this “S.N.L.,” Weekend Update is far from the most staid segment.

"TRAITORS: A VERY CONFIDENT MISTAKE" SKEWERING POP-CULTURE PHENOMS Given the enormous popularity of "The Traitors" in Britain, its "S.N.L." parody was bound to attract attention. That only became more true once it took on a simmering conversation about the competition's potential racial bias from an angle that's somehow both sly and bizarre.

Rather than hunting for Traitors, the sketch tasks players with searching for the “great big crab man” among them (played by Fouracres in an elaborate papier-mâché costume). As the fluo-

rescent orange crab gargles water and struggles to grab a pen with his claws, none of the white players can shake their suspicion of Imran (Riz Ahmed). Hearing the audience understand the angle in real time is a perfect reminder of how fun it can be to watch live comedy unfold.

["THE E-BIKE SONG"] BRINGING THE BEAT IN

BRINGING THE BEAT IN

With songs about aging boy bands,

"British-themed pubs" and the moment

wine turns on you, this cast is especially game for musical comedy (and is

strikingly good at performing it live).

But the biggest earworm may be "The

E-Bike Song."

Starring Jack Shep as a careless patron of London's infamous Lime bikes, "The E-Bike Song" is very silly. But it is also infused with classic

British garage beats and genuinely catchy à la the Lonely Island's best music parodies. For weeks, I've been unable to shake the image of Shep and the host Jamie Demetriou biking without using their hands (and barely their eyes), grinning wide and singing: "If I die, then I die! It's my life and I get to Klarna it...."

"NIGERIAN WICKED"

TRUSTING THE AUDIENCE

Giving the host Cynthia Erivo a "Wicked" parody was a no-brainer. Staging "Wicked" as a Nollywood film, though, was a stroke of genius.

"Nigerian Wicked" unfolds as a trailer for a movie following Elphaba (Ayoade Bamgboye) and Glinda (Erivo, playing against type with obvious relish) on their way to "LagOz." Unfortunately, when they meet the

Wizard (Hammed Animashaun), he turns out to be broke.

Watching the three actors riff off one another is a joy. But what makes the sketch so good is how granular it gets about Nollywood tropes. From Bamgboye's script to the actors' clipped speech, from the dizzying editing to the elaborate (yet visibly cheap) production design, "Nigerian Wicked" is a feast for Nollywood aficionados.

Yet you don't have to know a single reference to laugh at the jokes. What "Saturday Night Live U.K." gets — and what "Saturday Night Live" could stand to remember more often — is that specificity doesn't automatically alienate the audience. In fact, it can inspire comedy that is sharp and surprising enough to transcend cultures, oceans and 50-year-old formulas in need of a shake-up.

Rembrandt under your skin

AMSTERDAM

Dutch museum visitors have been getting tattoos of images by the artist

BY NINA SIEGAL

Henk Schiffmacher, a 74-year-old tattoo artist with gold teeth and a wide-brimmed hat, leaned forward to grasp Rachel van Haren's arm. He was concentrating on inking a rotund little elephant into her biceps, based on a 1637 Rembrandt drawing.

Schiffmacher, often described as the godfather of Amsterdam tattoo culture, grew up admiring the earlier Dutch master. Now, for two weeks, he's been doing his work next door to Rembrandt's 17th-century etching studio in the Rembrandt House museum in central Amsterdam.

Under the name "The Poor Man's Rembrandt Project," the tattoo artist and his studio, Schiffmacher and Veldhoen, have set up a pop-up tattoo parlor in the Dutch museum, and through Saturday, visitors can request a permanent remembrance of the timeless master inked into their skin.

"It's a highbrow-meets-lowbrow thing," Schiffmacher said in an interview.

On the wall behind Schiffmacher were dozens of his versions of Rembrandt drawings and etchings that clients could select. Customers, paying 100 to 350 euros (about \$110 to \$390) depending on the image, were seated in chairs or lying on tables around the room.

Van Haren, 28, said she had selected

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hansken, an elephant that Rembrandt drew several times in the 1600s, because it was simple without being simplistic. "He drew things just as they were, so it's not too much," she said.

Far left, Henk Schiffmacher holding the etching "The Descent From the Cross," which he has been tattooing across Bo Kwakernaak's back. Above, some choices Schiffmacher offers, and left, Rachel van Haren's arm being tattooed.

This is the second time the Rembrandt House has worked with Schiffmacher and his team, having previously done so in 2023. This time, they had a greater ambition: to reproduce one of Rembrandt's most famous etchings, "The Descent From the Cross," from 1633, across a man's back.

They put out a call about a month ago and received about 50 applications, Schiffmacher said. But some volunteers had scars, birthmarks or other tattoos that would have competed with the image. They found the right candidate in Bo Kwakernaak, 28, a production designer for film sets.

"We finally found a completely clean, young man with a beautiful back, and now we're working on him as a team," Schiffmacher said.

Epco Runia, the Rembrandt House's head of collections and research, said that Rembrandt and Schiffmacher — both masters of their disciplines — were linked by their efforts to popularize their art.

Rembrandt, Runia explained, made prints as smaller, affordable artworks that were within reach for those who couldn't afford his paintings. He added, "We are a print museum, so I think this fits us really well."

What might Rembrandt have made of the tattoo artist's work?

"I think he would have some kind of click with Henk Schiffmacher," Runia said. "They have a little bit the same kind of character."

The idea behind the pop-up studio was to draw a younger generation of visitors to the Rembrandt House, its director, Milou Halbesma, said. They did come, judging by the crowds of young people filling the studio.

There were also surprise guests, like a Rembrandt art dealer, curators and scholars from other museums, and a 75-year-old Rembrandt fan.

While contemplating which of his drawings might make a good tattoo, people tend to look at Rembrandt's art in a new way, Halbesma said. "It's a way of looking at Rembrandt — really closely," she said, "so they start loving his work again."

Schiffmacher said that a tattoo was basically “just a little ink drawing” on human skin and that both Rembrandt’s work and the tattoos would endure.

"We give a guarantee till at least 14 days after death," Schiffmacher said.

You must strike a pose. And be an author.

Increasingly, brands are using writers as models in ad campaigns

BY ASH WU

For some, the word "writer" conjures a specific look: bespectacled, tousle-haired and hopeless when it comes to fashion.

Now, as reading is increasingly presented as a lifestyle statement on social media and books are positioned as status symbols, popular American brands are playing up the idea that writing is sexy — and soliciting authors as models to prove it.

“Writer’ has become an aesthetic shorthand,” wrote Anika Jade Levy, a mainstay of the downtown Manhattan literary scene, in an email.

With her fellow Forever Magazine cofounders, Nat Ruiz and Madeline Cash — who has modeled for Gap, as a notable Céline model named Joan Didion once did — Levy has thrown stylish parties and posed for photo shoots with Los Angeles Apparel.

"The right novel is the ultimate accessory," she added. "A beautiful girl holding a book on the beach is a billboard."

Last month, the fashion brand Madewell released a campaign featuring Levy and three other authors: Michael Bible, Danielle Prescod — who writes about style for Marie Claire — and Kayla Maiuri.

Madewell's campaign arose from a collaboration with the New York Public Library and features the writers holding books and other literary accessories. One T-shirt in the collection sports the phrase "party girl," with "party" crossed out and replaced with "book." The shirt sold out shortly after the collection dropped, and is being restocked.

The Madewell creative director Steven Cateron told The New York

Times he was inspired by the style of librarians and the visual language of the library, and that he views writers as able to “create stories, images and feelings in ways we can’t through design.”

Such glamorous opportunities exist at odds with a grimmer financial reality for writers. An Authors Guild survey from 2023 found that half of all full-time authors earned “below minimum wage in many states from all their writing related work.”

With more traditional income streams drying up, modeling and brand deals offer authors a way to make up for disappearing pay.

"When fashion brands reach out for a campaign, it's not too dissimilar from when a magazine might reach out for a story," according to Michael Mungiello, a literary agent at InkWell Management who represents Bible and Levy.

Krithika Varagur, an editor for two literary magazines, The Drift and Equator, has also modeled for J. Crew. She noted the discrepancy between romanticizing a writerly image and funding the work that allows writers to thrive.

"The person swiping through reels is, in a way, similar to the person scanning the shelves of a bookstore."

"There may be more writers today than ever before in human history, but the infrastructure to support them (jobs, word rates, institutions) has not scaled to match," she wrote in an email. "I would love to see brands interested in the image of the writer make more of an effort to support the small magazines and presses that actually sustain literary culture today."

Even writers with significant institutional backing have gotten in on the action. Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of

WADE SCHAUL/J.CREW

MADEWELL

Above, the writer Anika Jade Levy modeling for a fashion brand in a recent marketing campaign. Left, the author Patrick Radden Keefe was featured in a J. Crew ad last year.

“London Falling,” wore blazers, collared shirts and a trench coat for a J. Crew ad that he described in an email as a “fun little larky thing to do.” However, he acknowledged that the correlation between modeling and book sales is “zero!”

"If this counts as 'patronage,' he added, "writers are in trouble."

To the eyewear brand Warby Parker, "writers are rock stars," according to Chrissie Miller, its director of special projects. The company holds an event series called Book Report, which has featured high-profile literary figures like Gloria Steinem, Jennifer Egan and Lena Dunham. Steinem even hosted a Book Report gathering in her home and helped to design a frame for the brand.

"Writers have bigger audiences now because of social media, Substack, BookTok and so many books being turned into TV shows and films," Miller added. "Their audiences are growing beyond traditional readers."

This crossover appeal “can recontextualize a literary novelist,” Mungiello explained. “The person swiping through reels is, in a way, similar to the person scanning the shelves of a bookstore.”

As writers increasingly rely on their platforms to attain book deals and attract readers, celebrities and fashion companies are adopting the trappings of literary life.

Fashion houses like Dior and Valentino have recently styled books as accessories and objets d'art. While A-listers like Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon have long run popular book clubs, a new generation of celebrities — including Dua Lipa, Dakota Johnson and the model Kaia Gerber — have joined them. These newer clubs often share edgier, less commercial titles more likely to be seen at a trendy Manhattan literary event than on long library hold lists.

The irony isn't lost on the writers themselves.

"I do think it's interesting that more models and actresses are forming book clubs and penning memoirs," Levy wrote. "But the grass is always greener. Actresses want to be authors and authors — at least according to Rachel Cusk — want to be bus drivers."

A dance through the music of time

BOOK REVIEW

Sound Tracks: An Archaeological Journey Through Our Musical Past By Graeme Lawson. Knopf. 241 pp. \$35.

BY ZACHARY WOOLFE

One of the jewels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection in New York is a violin made by Andrea Amati in Cremona, Italy, in the middle of the 16th century. A Latin inscription wraps around the sides, and painted decorations cover the back: fleurs-de-lis, flowers and, around the middle, some bits of what might have been a coat of arms.

On another Amati, this one in Paris, it's easier to identify the coat of arms as that of King Philip II. This has led to speculation that these instruments, now separated by an ocean, were created as part of the festivities surrounding Philip's 1559 marriage to Elisabeth of Valois.

Opera lovers will instantly recognize those two as the central characters in Giuseppe Verdi's masterpiece "Don Carlos." When I look at the Amati violin at the Met today, I can't help imagining it as it might have sounded some 450 years ago at the Spanish court, and then reverberating three centuries later onstage.

I've allowed myself this fantasy — of hearing a silent violin playing, of listening to the distant past, of jumping through time — because it's so similar to what Graeme Lawson does so artfully throughout “Sound Tracks.” An archaeologist who is also a musician, Lawson has based much of his career on analyzing instruments preserved in water, mud, ice and more, with the notion that even the tiniest fragments of wood and bone can, to an attentive and creative mind, conjure the sounds of long (long, long, long) ago.

His book is structured like a dig, starting at the top and working its way downward, layer by layer. So while we're used to histories that progress forward chronologically, "Sound Tracks" begins, intriguingly, in the present day and wends backward — anecdote by anecdote, object by object — all the way to sketchy visions of the footfalls of our ancestors four million years ago.

In between, this friendly, curious and informative journey takes in flutes snapped as part of human sacrifice ceremonies in 14th-century Mexico; silver whistles that sank with a ship off the English coast in 1545; pots that were, for some reason, embedded in the walls of a medieval church in a small German town; ancient Celtic trumpets; and several dozen more examples of finds that have broadened our sense of where, when, how, why and by whom music was made.

Lawson is a self-effacing guide, inclined toward underplaying his talents. But over the course of “Sound Tracks,” the impression builds of him as a kind of unflappable Hercule Poirot, moving from shipwreck to shipwreck, museum to museum, meticulously sifting through and weighing the evidence.

JESSICA WHITE/THE NEW YORK TIMES; DRAWINGS BY GRAEME LAWSON

"This is how, like crime detection, music's archaeology works at its best," he writes, "by the slow, patient assembling of clues, many of them negligible in themselves perhaps, but together slowly and steadily building a case."

He describes an excavation in Oxford, England, in which wire, tuning pegs and more gave “the strong impression of organized craft activity.” In other words, this was most probably the site of a 15th-century instrument repair shop, and especially significant because its remains “place musical industry for the first time in an urban landscape.”

Archaeology, Lawson writes, is "nosy, it's never satisfied and it's messy." He lets us glean insider information about the profession, not all of it sunny: At least two of his colleagues, he reports, have taken ill after being exposed to the poisonous dust made by working with the wood of the yew tree.

While movingly demonstrating how much research has been able to uncover and understand, Lawson is just as careful to note how much we don't know. (Maybe those Amati violins were part of a royal wedding gift, but maybe that's just poetic license.)

One of the cases he investigates involves the Celtic trumpet, known as a carnyx, which is thin and about six feet long, with flared ends capped by scary, seemingly screaming animal heads. Several were found in 2004 in a village in France, but it's unclear why these examples are missing crucial parts. Lawson muses on whether these were used in battle, damaged and recovered, or whether they were broken as part of a ceremony. Even more puzzling, a set of long, curved bronze horns found in Denmark have metal walls so thin that we can't fully replicate how they were made.

"To this day," Lawson writes, "their creation remains a mystery."

That kind of mystery comes up again and again in "Sound Tracks." Why was a prehistoric pipe painstakingly hollowed out of solid mammoth ivory when naturally hollow bird bones were available? It's unclear. How did a brass trumpet end up buried in the River Thames? Was it tossed off a boat? "Maybe the crew were drunk and it was deliberately thrown into the river in a moment of high spirits or mischief," Lawson supposes. "We'll never know."

Yet his informed guesses can be haunting. He tells about the discovery, in the late 1970s, of a set of 65 massive bronze bells that were buried in a Chinese tomb even more lavish than King Tut's. (After 2,500 years, the bells were, remarkably, still in tune.) In addition to the ruler for whom they were made, the tomb contained the coffins of 21 women. How did they die? Was it murder? And who were they?

"Given that musical instruments form the great bulk of the assembled objects," Lawson writes, "it seems reasonable to assume that some if not all of them must be the court and household musicians."

Plain-spoken and spine-tingling at once, it's a sentence that speaks for "Sound Tracks" as a whole: It lets the ghosts of faraway music be heard, faintly yet unforgettably.

Where the horses do the healing

At NIHI Sumba in Indonesia, above, the resident horse herd has the run of the resort. Below left, activities at Miraval Arizona include a session called “an unforgettable canvas,” in which guests paint on the horses’ sides, in a manner that is supposed to mimic mutual grooming. Below right, Riding Wild has various locations throughout the world for women.

JASON CHILDS

MIRAVAL ARIZONA

ANNIE CASEY

Retreats around the world offer meditation, yoga and therapy to restore balance

BY ONDINE COHANE

This is the year of the horse. Literally. According to the Chinese zodiac, 2026 is the year of the fire horse (an astrological event that takes place only every 60 years).

Research has shown that the therapeutic use of horseback riding can improve balance and coordination in people who have neurological conditions like cerebral palsy, and lessen the symptoms for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And even for those who are just ordinarily stressed, being around horses can be calming and restorative — part of a somatic healing approach, which focuses on how the body holds on to emotions. Around the world, resorts and outfitters are highlighting their human-meets-horse offerings, with programs that go beyond trail rides. Here are six.

NIHI SUMBA

SUMBA, INDONESIA

NIHI Sumba, on the Indonesian island of Sumba, is on every horse lover's wish list for its equine therapy and for its organic integration of horses.

“Even those who never ride often leave saying that simply being in the presence of the herd became one of the most memorable parts of their stay,” said Carol Sharpe, the resort’s “horse whisperer.” Besides riding, the resort offers numerous activities that involve horses, including swimming, yoga, guided meditations, reiki, gentle grooming and sunrise beach walks with the herd, which wanders freely around the resort.

"The horses are an integral part of the spirit of Sumba and NIHI," said Ms. Sharpe.

"Their presence, whether grazing freely across the landscape or quietly interacting with guests, brings a sense of peace and authenticity."

Rates start at \$2,053 per villa for two per night, and include airport transfers, three meals and nonalcoholic drinks, plus other amenities. Horse activities begin at \$83.

TUCSON, ARIZ.

Miraval began offering experiences with its horses in 1996, well ahead of the equine therapy trend. At Purple Sage Ranch (the Arizona resort's on-property ranch) activities include "meet the herd," to learn about horses and their healing properties; meditation sessions with the animals; and perhaps most compelling, "an unforgettable canvas," an activity in which guests "paint" on the horses' sides using washable colors.

Lucinda Vette, the equine specialist and program manager at the Arizona resort, said the activity mimics the mutual grooming between horses, and relaxes both human and equine participants. Interacting with the horses “helps us attune to energy, ours and theirs, and seems to create a sense of safety — not just in the head, but centered, felt, and grounded in the body," said Ms. Vette.

Rooms start at \$799 for two people, with equine experiences from \$109.

RIDING WILD

VARIOUS DESTINATIONS

The destinations change for this U.S.-based women-only outfitter — it has run programs in places like Chilean Patagonia, Scotland, Iceland and Yosemite National Park, among others — but all of Riding Wild's retreats focus on the therapeutic effects of horses.

Activities include somatic horse meditations, mindful riding, observational herd exercises, horse-guided energy healing, breath work and yin yoga. Guests sit alongside grazing horses, observe the subtle dynamics of the herd, regulate their breath, and discover what becomes possible when they slow down.

The idea, said Aniela Gottwald, the founder and owner, is to invite “women to experience horses not as animals to ride, but as highly sentient beings whose presence can foster greater self-awareness, nervous system regulation and emotional connection.”

The nonprofit organization offers full scholarships to Indigenous women and women of color who otherwise wouldn't be able to experience them. Trips start at \$2,995 per person.

Five hotels in North America and Europe to find your rhythm

THE MUSE NEW YORK

BY STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Music lovers have long been willing to travel to see their favorite acts, and in turn hotels have played up their proximity to concert venues. These days, more hotels are striving to become music destinations in their own right. Some are themed, like Dolly Parton's new SongTeller Hotel in Nashville, Tenn. Others are providing instrument lessons, listening rooms, recording studios, D.J. residencies and on-site concert series, be it at design hotels (like the Parker Palm Springs, which last month began offering Parker Sessions in a new amphitheater) or at major chains such as W, Virgin, Hard Rock and Sonesta International.

Below are some of the latest spots where music is at the heart of the hotel's character. Whether you're interested in rock, jazz, blues or electronic music, these getaways aim to put a song in your heart and a pillow under your head.

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

THE GUNTER HOTEL

This over-100-year-old hotel in downtown San Antonio — where in 1936 the blues musician Robert Johnson made one of his rare recordings — has reopened after a \$70 million renovation. Big band musicians, including Alphonse Trent, Mack Rogers and Henry Lange, once led the in-house orchestras, and while the Beaux-Arts-influenced hotel has been updated with reimagined spaces and new dining concepts (it also joined Marriott's Tribute Portfolio), its musical ties remain. All of its 311 rooms and suites have record players, along with a copy of a Johnson album. A vinyl library with more than 1,000 records allows you to check out your favorite.

Regular performances, be it mariachi or country music, are part of the experience. On Wednesdays, stop by the new Studio Lounge Sessions music series, where a lead artist typically invites friends to make music together. Bar 414 (named for the room number where Johnson recorded) offers free live music (the schedule is available online). And the Crystal Ballroom has ticketed concerts on special occasions.

From Nov. 12 to 14, there will be a celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Johnson recordings featuring his grandson, Steven Johnson, and performances by artists, including the pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph. Ally Venable, Tomar & the FCs and Nicky Diamonds will also perform, and there will be tours of the hotel's new recording studio.

In addition to Bar 414, you'll find three other places to grab a bite. Prices from \$250 a night; see the hotel's website for packages and offers.

WANSHIP, UTAH

THE LODGE AT BLUE SKY,

AUBERGE COLLECTION

When the luxury hospitality group Auberge Collection began noticing traveler interest in music tourism, it created its own concert series, featuring performances in intimate settings. At the Lodge at Blue Sky, a 46-room-and-suite getaway set on a private ranch in the Wasatch Mountain Range, about half an hour from Park City, upcoming performances include HARDY (Nov. 21) and Maren Morris (Dec. 4).

In addition to attending concerts in what was once the property's indoor riding arena, you can go hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, snowshoeing or try a massage, yoga or guided meditation. Yuta, the main restaurant, serves regional cuisine, including Utah rib-eye and lamb rack, and organic produce from the lodge's farm.

Accommodations have picturesque views and include suites, many with outdoor fireplaces. Room prices are from \$1,800 a night. Packages and à la carte concert ticket options and prices vary by artist. The Auberge Concert Series schedule, including seat details and pricing, is at Auberge.com/music.

NEW YORK

THE MUSE NEW YORK

This 201-room-and-suite hotel in Midtown Manhattan is home to a new 1940s-and-'50s-inspired jazz club with 170 seats. Known as the Pocket, the club is a nod to the jazz rooms that populated 52nd Street in that era. On any given night, amid the green leather banquettes, cherry wood and the 1964 Steinway grand piano, you might hear jazz, Latin music, hip-hop, R&B or soul.

Donny McCaslin, top, performing at the Pocket, a 1940s-and-'50s-inspired jazz club at the Muse New York hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Above, Bus Palladium, once a celebrated Parisian nightclub, has been reimagined as a boutique hotel with a subterranean club.

MATTHIEU SALVAING

Musicians scheduled to perform this month include Grammy Award winners such as Mingus Big Band, Arturo O'Far- rill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, and the New Orleans-based Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Complement the music with a martini or an Old Fashioned, and order from a menu that includes starters like broiled oysters in various styles; entrees such as prime rib, roasted chicken, fish or "broccoli steak"; and for dessert, pies from the Four & Twenty Blackbirds bakery, including salted caramel apple crumb and rhubarb crumble.

After the show, retire to your graphic black-and-white room (some rooms have outdoor space). Prices from \$299 a night. For the latest performance schedule and ticket information visit hotel website, thepocketnyc.com/calendar.

MADRID; LONDON; TULUM, MEXICO UMUSIC HOTELS

UMusic Hotels are a remix of traditional hotels, places to both sleep and enjoy live events. In December, UMusic Hotel Denmark Street is scheduled to open in London's Soho neighborhood, named for the street that's long been associated with the British music business and musicians like Elton John and the Sex Pistols. The Lower Third, a live music venue (and the name of a band David Bowie once worked with), is on Denmark Street, while the 2,000-seat music and performance venue, Outernet Live, is close by. The new 26-room-and-suite hotel will include a lobby cocktail bar and a fitness room, and will sit in the midst of the action.

Also in December, the brand plans to open UMusic Hotel & Beach Club Tulum, with 57 rooms and villas (some with Jacuzzis or private pools) and a beach club. The property is being designed as a destination for live music and other events, and will have recording studios and production facilities as well as beach access and a pool.

UMusic Hotels is developing properties in Kansas City and Austin as well, but in the meantime you can check out the first of its hotels, UMusic Hotel Madrid, which is near Plaza Mayor and has 130 rooms and suites, and access to the Teatro Albéniz from the hotel lobby. The hotel also has a vinyl library and a piano bar. Prices from €350 a night.

PARIS

BUS PALLADIUM

In 1965, a nightclub called Bus Palladium opened in the capital's Pigalle district, attracting revelers like Serge Gainsbourg, David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. Today, that nightclub has been reimagined as a five-story boutique hotel with a subterranean club where Madonna and Charli XCX have performed.

Designed by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, co-founders of the Paris-based architecture firm Studio KO, the hotel has 35 rooms and suites that mix elements of Brutalism, like raw concrete ceilings, with pink carpets and Hollywood-style mirrors. You can listen to playlists created by Caroline de Maigret, the French model and music producer, who is also the artistic director of the hotel, on OJAS speakers. There's a playlist called "Boogie Nights" for when you're getting ready to go out, with music by Prince and Grace Jones, and another called (naturally) "the French Connection," dedicated to French music with songs by Jacqueline Taieb and La Femme. Even little things nod to music, like light switches meant to look like vintage amplifiers.

Slide into a red velvet booth for dinner by the French chef Valentin Raffali at the hotel's evocative restaurant, which has a wall of vinyl records, including those that belonged to Bus Palladium's founder, James Arch. Sip a cocktail at the bar before heading to the club, where you can dance until the wee hours beneath a disco ball. The hotel, part of the Chapitre Six collection of French hotels, has prices from around €490, or about \$550, a night.

a film by SYLVAIN CHOMET

creative direction by JONATHAN ANDERSON

★★★★★

CHRISTIAN DIOR'S NIGHT IN COLOR

narrated by

ROBERT PATTINSON

LOUIS GARREL as Christian Dior

JOSH O'CONNOR as The Chair

NINE D'URSO, NADIA TERESZKIEWICZ and GRETA LEE as The Bees

LAKEITH STANFIELD

as Ron The Director

CAMILLE COTTIN

as Marlene Dietrich

watch the film on Dior.com

and RIHANNA as The Lucky Star