New york times

Remember the old quip about economists? “That’s all very in practice,” they say, “but how does it work out in theory?” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of the New York Times is a splendid example of that sort of folly. On the evening of November 9, 2016, Krugman skirled that the election of Donald Trump would precipitate economic Armageddon. “If the question is when markets will recover,” he said, “a first-pass answer is never.” How could they recover since the nation had just elected an “irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people,” that is to say, he didn’t take advice from people like Paul Krugman.Reality check: the day Krugman wrote that, the market closed at 18,589. In the last few days the Dow broke 50,000.

FBI Director Kash Patel popped up in several news stories on Friday. He does this periodically, like a skin or glandular disorder – a Kash Rash, as it were. Looking as though he’d spent last night consuming the contents of the FBI’s seized-drug storeroom, Patel announced at an airport presser that the FBI had seized former Canadian snowboarder Ryan Wedding, a “modern-day El Chapo” or Pablo Escobar who was running a multinational drug ring out of Mexico City. That seemed like good news, as did the fact that Patel said that there had been a 210 percent increase in gang takedowns and a reduction in FBI operational expenses in his first year.

Now that Congress has passed a law – not a flimsy resolution, but a law – mandating that the Trump administration release all its files on Jeffrey Epstein, here’s what we know, and what we still need to know. The basic elements of Epstein’s crimes were established back in 2006 by the Palm Beach Police, who began investigating the previous year after a woman reported that he had paid her 14-year-old stepdaughter for a massage. Over the next 13 months, the police gathered sworn statements from dozens of witnesses, including five underage girls who said they’d been paid $200 to $1,000 to engage in sex acts with Epstein. “The more you do, the more you get paid,” one of his assistants told a girl in a phone call recorded by the police.

Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook summit, sponsored by the New York Times, made a lot of news yesterday, though it felt more like 1975 than 2025, particularly when it came to “women’s issues”. We were one degree of separation from participants arguing over galleys of Ms. Magazine or getting into shouting matches with Norman Mailer. In the role of Phyllis Schlafly, the beautiful right-wing career woman leading a charge for a return to traditional values, was Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA and recent widow of Charlie Kirk. She claimed it was “ironic” that women in New York City had voted for Zohran Mamdani, given that many of them are childless but voiced support for his promise to provide free childcare for children under six years old.

When Whoopi Goldberg announced on The View that Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania would appear on the show to discuss why he voted to end the government shutdown, one audience member shouted “Boo!” It was just one audience member, on The View, on a Monday morning. But the liberal mind loves performative booing. Fetterman appeared on the show today via split screen from Washington, DC, wearing his signature black hoodie. The man won’t dress up for any occasion, and we must admire him for that. View host Alyssa Farah Griffin, the token Republican on the panel, said: You were critical of this shutdown from the outset, saying it never should have happened, never should have come to this, even at times criticizing your own party.

Good morning Britain. Donald Trump is flying to the United Kingdom today for his big state visit. Yet his Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to be going one step further. She appears to think that America, like Britain, ought to now be a country where you can go to jail for posting memes on Facebook.  Katie Miller, hosting Bondi on the Katie Miller Pod, said that Kirk’s murder last week was what happened when college campuses don’t take action against or expel students who harass conservative speakers. Using anti-Semitism as an example of left-wing campus “hate speech,” Bondi claimed in reply: “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.

Before I’d established my tiny crew of fellow local moms, I aggressively befriended – or tried to befriend – any woman with a baby who looked vaguely friendly. I’d try my luck in cafes, playgrounds, baby classes, yet with only minimal success (one find, a Cambridge-educated Irish lawyer, "forgot" her wallet on our date, leaving me to pay for her expensive glass of wine).So I clung gratefully to one of my café pickups, Marta, with whom two or three pleasant playdates (or rather: mommy walking dates) had taken place. I had rosy hopes for more as her kid was cute and reminded me of my own. But one day, strolling along the dark and wintry main drag that connected our two adjacent neighborhoods, things took a turn for the ominous.

“The old ways of doing business just aren’t cutting it” for the Democratic party, the New York Times wrote. Democrats are acting like a bloated, out-of-touch corporation that has no idea why it’s bleeding customers. The Times article talks at length about several PACs, activist groups and nonprofits that are trying to inject fresh ideas into the Democratic machine. These ideas add up to: knocking on doors and creating targeted digital ads. One functionary from a group called Priorities USA says that he wants the group to function “more like a venture capital firm, making a number of smaller bets on a wide range of initiatives and funding only the best performers – and using the incubation process as a way to learn about what works and doesn’t.

President Joe Biden granted 1,500 pardons in what was the largest single-day act of clemency by a US president back in January, on his final full day in office. But these were not the typical pardons since Biden did not actually sit down, uncap a fat Sharpie and draw out his signature. No: the pardons were granted with the autopen, and the Department of Justice and congressional Republicans have been investigating whether the former president was actually aware they were being signed. After seven months of crickets, Biden finally broke his silence on these accusations, last Thursday. He spoke to the New York Times, maintaining he "made every decision," and he did it "because there were a lot of them." The January 19 pardons did two things.

When it comes to Donald Trump and his achievements during his first 100 days, who are you going to believe, the New York Times or your lyin’ eyes?  By “the New York Times,” incidentally, I do not mean just that one woke media outlet masquerading as a source of news.  No, I take the Times as a metonym for the entire propaganda industrial complex, the giant dispenser of politically correct nostrums and seismically sensitive Keeper of the Narrative.  Thus it is that the Times is a reliable dispenser not of that sort of information we denominate “news” – that is, what is actually happening and who is involved in making it happen.

In June 2021, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ridiculed people that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak origin for Covid. He quipped: “Oh my God! There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? ‘Oh, I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it.” At the time, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Stewart’s rhetoric “dangerous and short-sighted.” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman fumed that “celebrities” shouldn’t be considered reliable sources of information and Forbes rounded up viewers uncomfortable with Stewart’s words.

Welcome, DC Diary readers, to the last edition of this newsletter before Tuesday night’s election. Most polls still have the presidential race at a dead heat between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Pennsylvania remains the lynchpin, as the paths for the respective candidates appears to be the Rust Belt and Pennsylvania for Harris, and the Sun Belt and Pennsylvania for Trump. Each campaign is pointing to data that they think gives them an advantage tomorrow.Trump’s team published a memo Monday, for example, pointing out that early vote numbers suggest turnout among urban voters and women is down significantly in the seven swing states compared to 2020.