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This week, The Times rolled out a list of the top 100 TV shows of the 21st century, as decided by a large group of television watchers and insiders. A few familiar shows, long anointed as part of the Mount Rushmore of prestige TV, topped the list: “Breaking Bad” at No. 1, “The Wire” at No. 2 and “Mad Men” at No. 3. (A fourth behemoth, “The Sopranos,” just missed being eligible, having debuted in 1999.)

Any list of great artworks presents a portrait of the era that produced them — in this case, the prestreaming era 20 years ago when cable channels like HBO and AMC ruled the dial and America felt like the world’s last remaining superpower. But what strikes me about these shows is not just how closely they echo their era but how presciently they envisioned the turmoil to come that would lead to the moment we’re in now.

“The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” besides being among the best shows the medium has ever produced, together served as a televisual Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Two hundred years from now, when people look to understand life in the United States in 2026 — a time of masked federal agents in the streets, presidential pardons for sale and gulag-style detention camps for immigrants — they’d be well advised to bypass whatever happens to be playing currently on TV. Despite these shows’ very different premises — one about the mafia, one about the drug trade in Baltimore, one about advertising on Madison Avenue in the 1960s and one about a chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin in New Mexico — all four contained clear warnings about where the country was headed, and their warnings have come true. Critics, at the time of their release, saw them, collectively, as prestige antihero television. We can now see they all had the same antihero at their core: America itself.

In 2008, “Breaking Bad” offered two separate portraits of American decline. The first was a portrayal of the financial crisis-era plight of the middle class. A good man with a decent job cannot afford even basic health care. The message: Don’t get unlucky in America. You’re on your own.

But the show shifted over its five seasons, subtly, slowly, into a portrait of a capitalist overlord run amok. The show was about meth in suburban America but now feels like an allegory about the material rise and spiritual decline of Silicon Valley. Like tech lords, Walter White sells an addictive product, produced by a proprietary formula, along global logistics networks, that generates a pile of cash so big the money is virtually meaningless. His accomplice Jesse asks him if he’s in the meth business or the money business, and the answer is neither: “I’m in the empire business,” he replies. Elon Musk couldn’t have put it any better. Seen from the vantage point of 2026, it’s almost too on the nose that Mr. White joins forces with a crew of white-power supremacists in his relentless quest for impunity.

“The Wire” was more systematic in its portrayal of societal breakdown. Its show bible — the detailed proposal and outline written before production — promised it “will be, in the strictest sense, a police procedural,” but one that addresses “larger universal themes that have more to do with the human condition, the nature of the American city and, indeed, the national culture.” David Simon, one of the show’s creators, was a journalist before he made television and Ed Burns, his co-creator, was a retired homicide detective. The great strength of “The Wire” lies in the depth of its creators’ familiarity with their subject matter, established over years of experience.

In “The Wire,” previously dependable social institutions flail and end in failure. Unions die. Journalism erodes, beset from within and without. The police devolve into a military force imposing its will with ever more desperate brutality against the most vulnerable citizens. Over its five seasons the show was less a snapshot than a warning about the corrosive effects of hypercapitalism as it consumes society. For all its gritty contemporary realism, the world that “The Wire” envisioned is the world we live in now.

“Mad Men,” with its swaggering advertising executives, seemed at first like a celebration of American optimism. When people talk about making America great again, this is the “again” they’re likely talking about. But inside the show’s portrayal of an imagined apex of American life was a revelation of the darkness that lay inside it. The show’s hero, Don Draper, is a whole-cloth creation: the son of a prostitute who stole another man’s name and rose to a new life, a kind of perverse Horatio Alger. The countercultural critique of advertising, which gave the show its central tension, is that advertising turns values into slogans and emotions into products, and once a feeling has been sold, it’s gone. “What is happiness?” Mr. Draper asks in a meeting. “It’s a moment before you need more happiness.”

The show ended with Mr. Draper having a spiritual crisis, retreating to a Californian Shangri-La of personal reinvention, where he looks to get in touch with how he really feels. But what he discovers, in the show’s memorable final moments, is that the counterculture — the authentic opposition to corporate consumption of human feelings — just wants to buy itself a sugary drink under the slogan “It’s the real thing.” Even the desire for authenticity can be converted into a product, packaged up and put on sale. Transaction is the only reality, and everyone sells out. Has there been a better definition of Trumpism?

Perhaps the most prescient show is “The Sopranos,” which among other attributes taught us sympathy for the gangster — or, rather, revealed to us just how willing we are to cheer a gangster on. Over the show’s six seasons, Tony Soprano’s evil kept expanding, his cruelty becoming more explicit, as “The Sopranos” taught us that everyone in America, even within crime families, is out for themselves. It offered a critique of the emerging hypocrisies that justified self interest above all, and showed how the survivors of all this brutality, even the wealthiest among them, still sat around wondering why they’re so unhappy. Sound familiar?

The show’s opening episode didn’t portend a program that would define one era, let alone prevision another. In its basic comic contrast and play on stereotypes, it felt like an extended riff on “Analyze This” — mafioso seeks therapy. But in his very first session with Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony articulated the show’s broader theme: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” What was he talking about? The mafia? Manhood? The country? “Many Americans, I think, feel that way,” Dr. Melfi agreed. Twenty-seven years later, it’s safe to say it’s not a feeling anymore. It’s a certainty.

In his 1947 book, “From Caligari to Hitler: a Psychological History of the German Film,” the critic Siegfried Kracauer charted the collapse of the Weimar Republic through its movies, which were rife with hypnosis, haunted men, sexual obsession, criminal authorities, abjection, split identities, technologies run amok and mass death. He called film the national “soul at work,” because it was produced and consumed collectively. The public fantasies captured the incipient reality.

Perhaps it’s coincidence but when Carmela Soprano visits a therapist in the third season of “The Sopranos,” his name is Dr. Krakower. In that scene — and I’m not sure there’s a better scene in the history of television — Carmela nearly storms out of his office. “You can leave now or you can stay and hear what I have to say,” Dr. Krakower says. She sits back down.

“You must trust your initial impulse and consider leaving him. You’ll never be able to feel good about yourself. You’ll never be able to quell the feelings of guilt and shame.” His advice? “Take only the children, what’s left of them, and go.”

Carmela hedges. Faced with her predicament, she’s not sure how to process her conundrum or her complicity.

“One thing you can never say,” Dr. Krakower tells her, “that you haven’t been told.”

Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of “The Next Civil War” and the host of the podcast “Gloves Off.”

Source photographs by Rahmat Gul/Associated Press and HBO/Alamy.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a character in “The Sopranos.” She is Carmela Soprano, not Carmella.

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The world is facing at least three crises today that cannot be resolved by any one country. Two are longer-term and arguably existential: the threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and the growing impact of climate change. One is shorter-term and damaging the global economy: the disruption of shipping lanes in the Middle East. All three require the kind of high-level international cooperation that helped manage other challenges, like the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War and the damage to the ozone layer.

Yet almost nobody expects meaningful progress during this week’s meetings in Washington between the leaders of the two most powerful countries, President Xi Jinping of China and President Donald Trump. Beneath the pomp of Mr. Xi’s visit, the agenda appears notably unambitious. At most, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled that America can hope for commercial deals and modest A.I. safety progress.

The low expectations for the visit underline the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to American influence and global well-being. He is an undisciplined politician who puts his personal interests above the nation’s, running an administration that has no coherent strategy for solving major problems. He is instead often exacerbating the world’s biggest problems.

No matter who was president, negotiations with China would be difficult. Mr. Xi is an autocrat who has centralized authority, oppressed his country’s citizens and built partnerships with the world’s most repressive regimes. Yet Mr. Xi does tend to be a ruthless tactician, and China and the United States do have overlapping interests on several major issues, including A.I., climate change and Middle East shipping lanes.

The notion that Mr. Trump could effectively represent America’s interests on these issues seems ludicrous at this point. Even on his own terms, his signature second-term actions, like the tariffs and war in Iran, are failing. No wonder that China’s leaders reportedly see his presidency as a gift to their ambitions for greater global influence. Americans are left to imagine the progress that could have been attempted this week with another president.

The first area of potential cooperation is A.I. safety. The rapid advancement of A.I. capabilities requires government regulation to limit the possibility that such tools could become uncontrollable and destructive. No one country can assure its own safety from these dangers. International cooperation is needed to mitigate the threat.

American A.I. models pose great risks because they are the most powerful. But China’s models are not far behind and pose their own risks because they tend to be open-weight, with their internal rules available for other users to alter. Fortunately, China has reasons to want safeguards. China’s spy chief recently warned that A.I. threatens one-party control there. China, like every country, also fears biological weapons.

Mr. Trump evinces little concern about A.I.’s risks and little interest in regulating it. He has said that the United States must beat China in the A.I. race, without regard for safety. That race does matter, but there are ways for the United States both to compete with China and to work together on the risks. The right policy is a mix of competition and cooperation, as this country pursued with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Today, the United States should make the scientific investments to remain ahead of China while negotiating over shared threats like bioweapons and A.I. systems that escape human control.

A second issue on which America urgently needs China’s help is in the Middle East. In response to Mr. Trump’s reckless war, Iran has restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, while the Houthis, a terrorist group allied with Iran, have expanded their disruption of traffic through the Red Sea. The price of oil has risen worldwide as a result.

Persuading Mr. Xi to pressure Iran to reopen the strait would not be easy. Mr. Trump is damaging America’s international status so badly that the Chinese leader can follow the dictum attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Still, China has an interest in the free flow of oil and lower energy prices. China’s economic growth has weakened in recent years, and higher oil prices do not help. The government’s stated position in talks with Iran is that it should reopen the strait. China certainly has the leverage to push Iran for a deal: It has been Iran’s largest customer for oil, buying 90 percent of its exports in recent years.

If anything, the third issue — climate change — is the one on which U.S.-China talks could offer the most promise if Mr. Trump were not president. China once was an obstacle to climate progress, complicating the attempts of the Obama administration to negotiate a global framework. Over the past decade, though, China has increasingly been willing to address climate change. Its world-leading renewable energy industry would benefit from international agreements that increase reliance on batteries and electric cars.

These three issues obviously do not represent a complete agenda for an ideal U.S.-China summit. Several others would be even trickier, including China’s support for Iran’s and Russia’s militaries and China’s increasing aggression toward Taiwan and several Asian countries. Realistically, any one meeting would probably not make much progress on the thorniest issues. But the United States and China are not merely rivals for international power; they also have shared interests in global stability.

American presidents going back more than 100 years have believed the country had an interest in taking a leading role in the world. America is far from perfect. But when it led, the world often benefited through expanded prosperity, security and democracy. The progress enhanced this country’s global prestige and influence along the way.

Mr. Trump shows little care for these benefits. He uses international relations to seek personal enrichment, praise from sycophants and equal standing with authoritarians. His flailing presidency leaves Americans with the thinnest of hopes for this week’s summit: that he does not further damage the national interest.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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In a wide-ranging interview, the Canadian leader laid out a detailed vision for breaking his country’s dependency on the United States.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada during an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday. Credit... Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

By Matina Stevis-Gridneff David E. Sanger Tyler Pager and Colby Smith

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said that he had prepared over the past year for the “extreme tail risk” that President Trump might order military action against Canada, but disclosed that the two men have spoken “frequently,” even since trade talks collapsed last month, describing a tense, evolving relationship.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times at its headquarters in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, Mr. Carney described in meticulous detail how he was systematically reducing Canada’s reliance on the United States for key technology — from space satellites to fighter jets — in an effort to make his country far less vulnerable to American threats. He outlined a plan to diversify Canada’s relationships and suppliers, and said that even with a different future president “we will be a better partner for the U.S. because of what we are doing.”

He talked about reducing reliance on Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite systems; considering alternatives to buying F-35 fighter jets; and a focus on deepening economic — though not defense — relationships with China. Mr. Trump’s exploitation of Canadian dependency on American products had taught the country a bitter lesson: “There’s certain things, once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them.”

Anthony Shorris, the new president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, believes that his agency can help realize the mayor’s goal of making the city more affordable.

One week into Anthony Shorris’s tenure as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, he said he has come to a simple conclusion. If Mayor Zohran Mamdani is going to solve the city’s food affordability problem, he will have to go beyond his plan for five city-owned grocery stores.

“I think groceries was a symbol for the larger issue, food affordability, which is broad and important,” Mr. Shorris said during a nearly hourlong interview.

“I also want to be clear about a couple of things on food — I don’t think the only intervention in food is grocery stores,” Mr. Shorris also said.

Mr. Shorris, whose long career in public service began under the Koch administration, has been charged with delivering Mr. Mamdani’s economic development agenda, one that prizes affordability and that his administration has said should focus on quality, not just quantity, of jobs.

Few would dispute that food affordability remains a serious issue in New York City. A recent report found that more than 40 percent of families with children in the city said they needed more money to meet their food needs.

António Guterres is stepping down in December after two terms as secretary general. No front-runner to succeed him has emerged so far.

Farnaz Fassihi has covered the U.N. and the annual General Assembly of world leaders for 11 years through four U.S. administrations.

As the United Nations searches for its next leader, diplomats say there are key qualities they would like to see in the next secretary general. They seek someone who proactively puts the U.N. at the center of resolving global conflicts and enforces cost-cutting and reform.

The topic of who will succeed António Guterres when he steps down in December is expected to be hotly debated this week behind closed doors in diplomatic meetings during the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York. The conversations “will drive a lot of the candidates’ fortunes and separate contenders from pretenders,” said Daniel Forti, the head of U.N. affairs at the International Crisis Group.

The U.N. Security Council selects the secretary general in a monthslong process that begins with an informal, nonbinding and closed “straw poll,” or informal ballots. The 15 members of the Council vote for the candidates.

They say whether candidates are “encouraged” or “discouraged,” or “no opinion is expressed.”

What is “civilizationism”?

Mr. Schuette is a fellow in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Guida is an editor in Times Opinion.

We are not done trying to make sense of the jolts and lurches of Trump 2.0. Take foreign policy: President Trump and a group of intellectuals of the “New Right” have transformed how America acts in the world.

But is there a grand strategy behind this convulsion? Leonard A. Schuette, a fellow in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, thinks that there is, or that at least one in the works.

Schuette calls this strategy “civilizationism.” In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, he explained that this theory would structure the world into spheres of influence defined by civilizations, with hegemons (the United States, China) dominating their own spaces and pursuing peaceful coexistence rather than aspiring to global leadership.

With Trump meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, this week, Schuette explored “civilizationism” and its implications at home and abroad in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.

John Guida: What were the pre-Trump 2.0 traditional foreign policy groups, and how do they contrast with “civilizationism”?

Group tech houses have proliferated across the San Francisco Bay Area in the artificial intelligence boom. One of the most prominent has also racked up an extensive police record.

Reporting from Hillsborough, Calif., and San Francisco

The eight-bedroom Mediterranean-style mansion, which borders a golf course in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Hillsborough, Calif., has gone through a lot in recent years.

A car flew through the air at one party on its grounds. At another event, titled “Midnight in Paris,” guests arrived in horse-drawn carriages to a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, has given talks at the home. And Claire Boucher, the singer-songwriter known as Grimes and the onetime partner to Elon Musk, has performed there.

The mansion is one of the most prominent — and notorious — tech group homes, which have proliferated across Silicon Valley and San Francisco amid the artificial intelligence boom. Long gone are the fraternity-style rental homes popularized by Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook, where grungy engineers coded all day and crammed into shared rooms at night.

Today these so-called hacker houses are driven by missions , like the advancement of humanity, and have become critical nodes for the A.I. industry. Residents are often start-up founders or engineers working at OpenAI or Anthropic. Rent can hit $10,000 a month for a room.

Federal officials are drafting an executive order that would place grants under review by an outside panel, the latest effort to redirect billions of dollars in research spending.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson Sheryl Gay Stolberg Tony Romm and Michael C. Bender

The White House has begun drafting a new executive order that could further cement President Trump’s ability to control billions of dollars in scientific grants and expand the administration’s pressure campaign against elite universities.

Discussed at a highly contentious meeting at the White House on Friday, the order aims to create a new external committee with the power to veto awards in the National Institute of Health’s vast research portfolio that do not conform to Mr. Trump’s political agenda, according to people with knowledge of the effort.

During the meeting, Mr. Trump repeatedly complained about his administration’s failure to bring Harvard University in particular to heel. The administration has been unable to hammer out a deal with the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, a central plank of his broader push against “woke” ideology in higher education.

The White House has also lost a pair of lawsuits to Harvard, including one ruling that blocked cuts to the university’s existing federal research grants. The government has said it plans to appeal.

President Trump insisted for months that the Danish territory should be part of the United States. Now, a security deal — not a takeover — seems to be on the table.

By Maya Tekeli Lynsey Chutel and Amelia Nierenberg

After months of threats, retorts and closed-door negotiations, the United States has reached a deal to expand its security presence in Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory, according to President Trump.

The specifics of the agreement, announced on Friday , were not immediately made public. But it clearly falls short of the outright American takeover that Mr. Trump had demanded, a threat that roiled the NATO alliance, of which Denmark is a member.

In a social media post, Mr. Trump said the deal gave the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs” in Greenland. But the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, stressed that the agreement “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Denmark.

Mr. Trump had said since his first term that the United States wanted to acquire Greenland , and he became more insistent about it after returning to office last year. One of his aides said Mr. Trump wanted to buy the island , and another suggested that the United States could simply take it by force .

Mr. Carlson, the far-right podcaster, has promoted Dr. El-Sayed’s comments and sharply criticized his Republican rival in a key Senate race. Strategists are scratching their heads.

Tucker Carlson, the influential far-right podcaster, lives in Maine and spent more than three decades defending the Republican Party before leaving it this year over his opposition to the war with Iran. He is known for his nativist rhetoric and once said immigrants were making the United States “ poorer and dirtier. ”

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, lives in Michigan and has spent his adult life pushing for progressive causes. Now Dr. El-Sayed is the Democratic Party’s nominee in a pivotal Senate race, running on a left-wing platform that calls for universal health care and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Yet, in a striking twist that underscores his shifting politics, Mr. Carlson has taken to defending Dr. El-Sayed. Both are vocal critics of the Israeli government and the war with Iran.

In recent weeks, Mr. Carlson has repeatedly spoken in positive terms about Dr. El-Sayed and castigated his Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, a critic-turned-ally of President Trump with hawkish foreign policy views.

“I wouldn’t vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint,” Mr. Carlson said on his podcast this month, adding, “There’s no one who should be farther from a position of power than Mike Rogers.”

For most of its life, The New York Times has tried to correct its errors. These efforts have not always been perfect.

Adam Nagourney, a New York Times reporter since 1996, is the author of “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.”

For most of its existence, The New York Times corrected errors of spelling and facts with a sentence or two, usually tucked inside the newspaper. It wasn’t until it was well into its second century that the paper began to dig deeper into its own lapses and explain its mistakes to readers, or at least some of them. Corrections moved to more prominent positions, typically Page 2 or the front of the second section, and sometimes even to the front page.

One of the first signs of this new era came in the early 1980s, when Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor at the time, created the “editors’ note,” designed, he said in a memo announcing the new policy, to “amplify articles or rectify what the editors consider significant lapses of fairness, balance or perspective.” Rosenthal wrote one of the first notes himself in 1985 after he objected to what he said was the snide tone of a Times story about a friend, Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher and real estate developer. “Through opinionated phrases and unattributed characterizations, the article established a tone that cast its subject in an unfavorable light,” said the note, which was unsigned.

By 1987, under a different executive editor, Max Frankel, The Times published a correction of more than 1,200 words — as long as many news stories — addressing mistakes in an article that recounted the congressional testimony of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North about the Iran-contra scandal. This appeared on July 13, 1987, under a headline that ran across two columns of the front page: “A Correction: Times Was in Error on North’s Secret-Fund Testimony.”

The remedy may have seemed excessive. “I wouldn’t have insisted on putting a correction on the top of Page 1 to make a point,” Joseph Lelyveld, whom Frankel later named his managing editor, told me years later for a book I wrote on the modern history of The Times.

The building was previously damaged by an Israeli strike, the local rescue service said. Its fall underscored the severe risks for many people living among Gaza’s ruins.

The Israeli military said in a statement it “did not strike the building,” but did not say whether any strikes on nearby targets could have caused the damage.

By Natan Odenheimer Adam Rasgon and Abu Bakr Bashir

Natan Odenheimer and Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv.

A war-damaged building in Gaza collapsed on Wednesday, killing at least 21 people, including children, and trapping many more beneath the wreckage, according to local officials.

The incident shines a light on the perilous conditions in Gaza after the devastating war that followed the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Officials have warned that many more buildings damaged in Israeli strikes are at risk of collapse. The lack of progress on reconstruction has forced residents to choose between living in seriously compromised buildings or in tents.

Dozens of people were living in the Saada residential building in Gaza City when it caved in at around 2 a.m. local time, according to the Civil Defense rescue service, which is part of the Hamas-run interior ministry in Gaza.

As part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s program to shrink the federal work force, paid administrative leave costs rose by 435 percent.

The Trump administration paid federal employees $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, part of the president’s plan to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy and government spending, according to a new estimate from a congressional watchdog.

Drastically reducing the size of the federal work force was part of a broader Trump administration plan to rein in what it called frivolous and wasteful federal spending, with an initial promise of $1 trillion in savings.

The administration has said its efforts have led to more than $200 billion in savings, a figure that outside experts have not independently confirmed . In addition, the federal deficit has increased since Mr. Trump returned to office, in part because of the war in Iran and the sweeping tax cuts that Republicans enacted in 2025.

During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a government initiative to cut spending “is coming.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned on Sunday of competitive risks from China, and Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, said Congress should start regulatory talks this week.

As warnings rapidly mount over the pace and potential dangers of artificial intelligence development, the top Republican and Democrat in the House agreed on Sunday that Congress should put guardrails in place, but would not commit to specific policies or a timeline for doing so.

Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, urged caution in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying that the House could not hastily pass regulations and that lawmakers needed to ensure American companies remain competitive with Chinese A.I. firms.

“We’re not going to rush in and pass a piece of legislation that would do harm to the country and put China at an edge,” Mr. Johnson, who controls what legislation comes to the House floor, said. “And so we’ve got to do this carefully.”

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, criticized Mr. Johnson for moving too slowly, saying in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that the House should take “decisive action.” But when he was asked for specific restrictions that he might back, Mr. Jeffries would not elaborate.

“Well, we’ll have that conversation this week upon our return,” he said. Mr. Jeffries is considered the leading contender to become speaker if Democrats take control of the House after the midterm elections.

The midterms dodge their first MAGA bullet. It won’t be the last.

It’s only September, and America just barely averted the first constitutional crisis of this year’s midterm elections.

Hang with me here because this gets a bit complicated. Last September, the Missouri Legislature passed a redistricting bill called H.B. 1 . This bill was part of the wave of mid-decade census redistricting initiated after President Trump essentially ordered the state of Texas in July to redistrict to create more Republican-majority congressional districts and diminish Democratic voting power in the state.

Texas dutifully complied, and this set off a lopsided redistricting arms race between red states and blue states that has resulted in Republicans thus far potentially gaining 10 additional Republican districts , a number that — in a close election — could easily decide control of the House.

To illustrate how important 10 seats could be, the House majority for both Republicans and Democrats hasn’t exceeded 10 members after an election since the 2018 midterms.

Missouri, a bright red state, has eight representatives in Congress, two Democrats and six Republicans. The Legislature altered the maps to eliminate one of the Democratic seats, hoping to create an even more lopsided outcome — leaving the roughly 40 percent of Missourians who vote Democratic with, in essence, only one Democratic representative.

The Missouri Constitution , however, contains a provision that says that the people of the state “reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.”

A dispatch from Dallas 2026.

Ms. Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion.

As with everything President Trump touches, his party’s midterm mini-convention was a spectacle. Slick videos, light shows, balloons, U.F.C. fighters, Lee Greenwood and a sea of sparkles and sequins covering the thousands of MAGA devotees assembled to celebrate their leader.

However you want to characterize “Dallas 2026” — a convention, a political rally, “Trumpapalooza,” as its cheeky billing had it — the Republican Party’s midterm convention was at heart an extended opportunity for this president, who is feeling his impermanence, to drive home to his fellow Republicans, and really all of America: Everything is still all about me, so don’t try to wriggle away.

The president’s face and name were splashed everywhere. The attendees, many of whom shelled out big bucks for a ticket, were awash in Trump wear: hats, shirts, jackets. The merch fell into two categories: gear sporting the basic Dallas 2026 logo, alongside a variety of Trumpy MAGA options. Plus copies of Eric Trump’s book, piled near the checkout counter. (Can’t miss an opportunity for family enrichment!)

Mr. Trump was the scheduled closing act both nights, and his fans sat through hours of opening videos and speakers — a mix of candidates, cabinet members, congressional leaders and “everyday Americans.” Program participants had two key jobs: praise the president and terrify the party faithful about the communist, socialist, anarchist hellscape that a Democratic victory in November would usher in.

The latter message, of course, was also framed in terms of Mr. Trump’s unparalleled leadership. He saved America from the horrors wrought by President Joe Biden, and now it is up to his voters to keep Congress in Republican hands to enable him to “finish the job.” At long last, the president was getting a convention focused on attacking the Biden presidency, making up for the one he felt cheated out of in 2024.

A journalist, he was the first Japanese person to enter space, joining a Soviet crew as part of a spectacular $35 million ratings stunt in 1990.

Toyohiro Akiyama, a television reporter who became the first Japanese person to enter space, earning the nickname “ space antihero ” for his lack of bravura and insatiable cigarette cravings, died on Aug. 26 at his home in Odai, Japan, about 85 miles southeast of Kyoto. He was 84.

The cause was lower gastrointestinal bleeding, his wife, Reiko, said.

In 1990, at the end of the Cold War, Mr. Akiyama became the star of an improbable reality show, broadcast live before millions, when he was sent by his network, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, on a commercial voyage to the Mir space station alongside two Soviet cosmonauts. It was a spectacular $35 million ratings stunt, with TBS paying about half that amount directly to the Soviet Union to include Mr. Akiyama, then 48, in the launch. And it would make him the first journalist to go to space.

It seemed plausible that Mr. Akiyama would return a national hero. Instead, he was wracked by nausea and discomfort on the eight-day mission; his Soviet colleagues later said they had never seen a man vomit so much.

Mr. Akiyama devoted his broadcasts from the cosmos to stories about headaches, bland food and complicated bathroom protocols, and they contained no grand revelations or meditations on the meaning of life. A chain smoker, he frequently pined for cigarettes — and for natto, the fermented beans of his home country.

The state is considering extending the life of its last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, and allowing construction of new reactors to help meet its clean energy goals.

Established nuclear plants like Diablo Canyon in California tend to produce relatively affordable power. Credit...

Ivan Penn, who has covered nuclear energy for more than 15 years, reported from the Diablo Canyon Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, Calif.

The Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which sits on a cliff on California’s Central Coast, has been the subject of ceaseless protests and political battles since it was proposed in 1963.

Now, the plant is at the center of yet another major debate. After shuttering all the state’s other nuclear power plants in recent decades, California is considering extending Diablo’s life and lifting a moratorium on new reactors.

That these decisions are even on the table in California is a testament to the substantial change in public views of nuclear energy, which for decades has been reviled by the liberal lawmakers and environmental groups that wield tremendous power and influence in the state.

As Route 66 turns 100, tourists in search of Americana try to keep war, inflation and politics in the rearview.

Reporting from Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona and California

Wolfgang Werz took a drag on his cigarette and a sip from his coffee cup, looked at his watch and blew his whistle. It was 8 a.m. in the parking lot of the Best Western in suburban St. Louis, time for Mr. Werz to rally his troops — a dozen German and Swiss tourists — so they could jump on their Harley-Davidson motorcycles and head out on Route 66.

Mr. Werz, who is 67, rattled off the day’s stops on their roughly 200-mile stretch through Missouri: the Wagon Wheel Motel in Cuba; the rocking chair in Fanning; the Devil’s Elbow Bridge; the Redmon’s Candy shop in Phillipsburg; and, by about 5 p.m., Springfield, the birthplace of the highway known as the “The Main Street of America.”

Then Mr. Werz, a wiry, weather-beaten former ski instructor from Tübingen, Germany, looked at the group of middle-aged bikers in leather jackets and boots and gave them their marching orders on day three of their two-week, 2,500-mile sojourn from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif.: “Let’s go get your kicks.”

The “Mother Road,” as John Steinbeck dubbed Route 66 in “The Grapes of Wrath,” turns 100 this year, and the motels, diners and gas stations along the road have repaired their neon signs, refreshed their menus and stocked their shelves with commemorative goods for the flood of extra traffic. Tourism boards and Route 66 associations have held classic car rallies, street painting contests and art installations, including a 23-foot stained-glass-style push pin that marks the midpoint of the road in Oklahoma.

Hundreds have been deported to Haiti in recent weeks, and some say they have been left with no money, no protection from gangs and no place to go.

Dozens of deportees are arriving in the Haitian city of Cap Haitien weekly as the Trump administration pushes to remove Haitians who lack legal immigration status in the United States, and some are now marooned in an unfamiliar place.

More than 80 people were returned last week, often with only the U.S. government-issued sweatpants and T-shirts, and with immigration court documents stuffed in their pockets. Many returned broke, saying their valuables had disappeared during the trip and they now lacked the cash to get home.

The road out of Cap Haitien, on Haiti’s northern coast, is controlled by gangs that extract tolls from drivers and kidnap travelers. Five police officers who tried the trip by bus recently were murdered.

A day after being deported, Reginald Dorvilma, 36, sat stranded on Friday outside the Cap Haitien police station, making phone calls. He needed to find his way through gang territory to Les Cayes, his hometown on the other side of the country.

The Haitian immigration authorities had given him and the other adults who arrived on the latest deportation flight 10,000 Haitian gourdes — the equivalent of about $80. On his first night back, he said, he had spent about $20 at a low-end hotel and then bought a change of clothes. He had less than $40 left.