Present day gifts

The coronavirus pandemic has been defined by so much loss. Of lives, jobs, relationships. Of normalcy. But amid that upheaval, there have been occasional moments of hope, small positive changes borne from the chaos of the past three years. Hundreds of you wrote to us about the ways that pandemic disruptions surprisingly reshaped your lives for the better. Some of you found time to start a new business venture or fall in love. Lockdowns allowed you to spend more time with your children or parents, or prioritize your own happiness through daily morning walks, new recipes or oil painting. In June 2020, I adopted a sickly kitten, a responsibility I wouldn’t have been able to take on had I not been newly working from home. Now she’s almost 3 years old and a lovable companion for whom I feel immensely grateful. Reading your pandemic silver linings genuinely improved my week. I hope you enjoy them, too. Here’s some of what you shared, lightly edited for clarity. “In the spring … [Read more...] about Californians Share Their Pandemic Silver Linings

The Yankees had a huge winter, from re-signing record-breaker Aaron Judge and then naming him captain to retaining Anthony Rizzo and also adding another ace-level arm to their starting rotation in Carlos Rodon, all for a cool $562 million. But was it a big enough buying binge to guarantee there won’t be yet another October disappointment? Over the past few seasons in the Bronx, playoff failure has joined Halloween as an October constant. Three times since 2017, the Yanks have lost to the Astros in the AL Championship Series, including a humiliating sweep last year. The Red Sox have sent the Yankees home twice in earlier rounds over that same time frame and the Rays did it once. All those defeats have left Yankee fans pining for the glory of 2009 — the last time the Yankees won the World Series — and hoping that Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman can assemble a roster capable of unlocking MLB’s treacherous playoffs. Can the 2023 Yankees be the club that finally takes that joyful … [Read more...] about Scouting the Yankees: Experts weigh in on if Bombers have done enough to make World Series run

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more -- a view of the planet's ultimate limits, a vision of humanity's destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era. They lead two intellectual schools -- sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters -- that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain … [Read more...] about Betting on the Planet

A Swiss chief returns UBS unexpectedly said on Wednesday that it was bringing back Sergio Ermotti as C.E.O., as the Swiss bank begins the tough task of digesting its archrival, Credit Suisse. It’s another sign of how tricky UBS considers the work of taking over its main competitor, via a $3.2 billion deal that continues to draw blowback from investors and Swiss lawmakers alike. The move had been in the works for days. Colm Kelleher, UBS’s chairman, said at a news conference that he first called Mr. Ermotti to discuss a potential return on March 20, less than a day after UBS announced it was buying Credit Suisse. Mr. Ermotti, who left UBS in 2020, will replace Ralph Hamers on April 5. The UBS board determined that “for this massive integration exercise, Sergio would be the better pilot for the next part of this voyage,” Mr. Kelleher said. Mr. Hamers will stay on for an unspecified period as an adviser to help with the transition. At the news conference, Mr. Hamers … [Read more...] about UBS Taps an Ex-C.E.O. to ‘Pilot’ Its Takeover of Credit Suisse

“I feel like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Who are these guys that just keep coming?” — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. It was the weekend of Sept. 13, and the moment Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had feared for months was finally upon him: Lehman Brothers was hurtling toward bankruptcy — fast. Knowing that Lehman had billions of dollars in bad investments on its books, Mr. Paulson had long urged Lehman’s chief executive, Richard S. Fuld Jr., to find a solution for his firm’s problems. “He was asked to aggressively look for a buyer,” Mr. Paulson recalled in an interview. But Lehman could not — despite what Mr. Paulson described as personal pleas to other firms to buy some of Lehman’s toxic assets and efforts to persuade another bank to acquire Lehman. With all options closed, he said, the government’s hands were tied. Although the Federal Reserve had helped bail out Bear Stearns — and was within days of bailing out the giant insurer American … [Read more...] about Struggling to Keep Up as the Crisis Raced On

MIAMI — Dalia Carmeli, who drives a trolley in downtown Miami, voted for Donald J. Trump on Election Day. A week later, she stopped in to see the enrollment counselor who will help her sign up for another year of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. “I hope it still stays the same,” said Ms. Carmeli, 64, who has Crohn’s disease and relies on her insurance to cover frequent doctor’s appointments and an array of medications. Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress are vowing to repeal much or all of the health law, a target of their party’s contempt since the day it passed with only Democratic votes in 2010. If they succeed, they will set in motion an extraordinary dismantling of a major social program in the United States. But for now, with open enrollment for 2017 underway, people are steadily signing up or renewing their coverage, and in conversations last week in South Florida, many refused to believe that a benefit they count on would actually be taken away. … [Read more...] about Many in Florida Count on Obama’s Health Law, Even Amid Talk of Its Demise

I. A Broken Economy As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working. The fact that the economy grows — that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one — no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems … [Read more...] about Obamanomics

Back in the 1980s , two young Harvard professors trying to reinvigorate the Democratic Party would meet at the Wursthaus restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., to have lunch and argue with each other. They must have made for an entertaining sight, one of them bearish and the other less than five feet tall, debating each other in a dark Harvard Square dive. The argument, in a nutshell, came to this. The smaller man — Robert Reich, a future secretary of labor — argued for something that he called “industrial policy.” Since the government couldn’t avoid having a big influence on the economy, he said, it should at least do so in a way that promoted fast-growing industries and invested in worthy public projects. The bearish professor was Lawrence H. Summers, who was then the youngest person to have received tenure in the modern history of Harvard University. He loved to tackle big, broad questions, and, by his lights, industrial policy amounted to another version of the governmental meddling … [Read more...] about Larry Summers’s Evolution

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have to "face the reality" that if they attend the coronation of King Charles in May that they will only do so as "fringe players" with no official ceremonial roles, a prominent royal biographer has told a new episode of Newsweek 's The Royal Report podcast. Sally Bedell Smith, a royal expert and author of the soon-to-be-released George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Shaped the Monarchy , gave her thoughts on the hotly debated topic of Harry and Meghan's potential appearance at the king's coronation in a discussion with chief royal correspondent, Jack Royston. Speculation over whether the couple would attend, or be invited, after the release of their bombshell media projects in recent months was increased in January when Harry swerved the question when asked about it in an interview with ITV's Tom Bradby. Asked whether he would attend the May 6 ceremony or not, the prince said: "There's a lot that can happen between now and … [Read more...] about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will be “fringe players” at the coronation

By now, plenty of us know that artificially intelligent virtual assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can pull off sensational stunts, such as winning coding contests, passing bar exams and professing love to a tech columnist. But I wondered: How helpful are the bots, really, as actual assistants? It’s worth asking because our first rodeo with virtual assistants didn’t go so well. Older A.I. bots like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa had more than a decade to improve, but they ended up stagnating and are now used mostly for setting timers and playing music. ChatGPT and Bard, on the other hand, use so-called large language models that recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. They are trained to compose sentences on the fly as if they were human, which potentially makes them far more versatile as assistants. To test that theory, I came up with a list of tasks that people might ask of a human assistant. I prodded friends who … [Read more...] about How ChatGPT and Bard Performed as My Executive Assistants