A Costco rotisserie chicken. A yoni egg. A red Solo cup. Want to understand America? These 25 artifacts are what make us us.

Opinion | The 25 Objects That Explain America

Want to understand this country? Look at our stuff.

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“It’s no longer considered cool, even in an edgelord kind of way, to be tacitly embracing the Trumpian vision,” Jessica Grose writes about tradwives and the manosphere.

Opinion | Tradwives and the Manosphere Have Lost Their Viral Appeal

Nara Smith’s illusion meets the anti-Trump reality.

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“There’s no room for even a modest Trumpian comeback if the entire political world spends the next two years positioning itself for an age of certain Democratic power and revenge,” our columnist Ross Douthat writes.

Opinion | Can Trump Wriggle Out One Last Time?

Between Iran and the midterms, his decade of rebounds and comebacks might be over.

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“The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs,” our columnist Bret Stephens writes.

Opinion | I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

It’s bad for your brain and worse for democracy.

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“For business leaders who want to succeed in the long term, this is the time to embed climate change into core business discussions and decisions in risk management, finance and operations,” Lea Borkenhagen writes in a letter to The Times.

Opinion | When Companies Retreat on Climate Change

Readers respond to a front-page article about how big businesses are deserting climate goals. Also: President Trump’s polls, and his unreality.

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“Wyoming, like other red and rural states, has a problem,” German Lopez writes. “Its suicide rate is about double the national figure.”

Opinion | The Suicide Crisis in Wyoming

Wyoming has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation.

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The “Gordie,” as the new Gordie Howe International Bridge between the United States and Canada is known, scores one against Trump, writes Paul A. Eisenstein.

Opinion | The Bridge That Divides America and Canada

What should be a symbol of longstanding Canadian-U.S. ties now divides two once close allies.

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“There is no more dynamic force in Democratic politics — bar none — than the Democratic Socialists of America,” Thomas Edsall writes. “At the same time, the liabilities surrounding the socialist label threaten to limit potential center-left gains in voting.”

Opinion | Is It Really True That Socialism Is a Threat to the Democrats?

Trying to determine how much of a problem the D.S.A. poses for the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects. If it actually does.

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On this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show,” Jasmine Sun, a writer covering technology, takes us into the backlash against A.I. data centers.

Opinion | The A.I. Giants Weren’t Prepared for This

Jasmine Sun, a writer covering technology, takes us into the backlash against A.I. data centers.

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The initial American strategy failed, the war with Iran is consuming the region, Iran and Ukraine are risking a face-off, both Russia and China are escalating their military commitments, American munitions are dwindling and Trump is raging. Other than that, everything is fine.

Opinion | World War Two-and-a-Half Is Breaking Out

Whatever is happening in Iran, it isn’t working.

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It will depress you! Sorry about that but it’s kind of my jam. I selected well-written books, some of them are even wryly funny at times — if you come from a culture with macabre humor. Still, the issue is big, complex, and scary. All the more reason for us to face it together.

John Robinson@jrobin.bsky.social · 2d ago

A reading list that I know will depress me, but one that also seems vital to understand (and fight this version of) the future. From the brilliant @tressiemcphd.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...

Nicaragua’s regime already oversees virtually every institution capable of influencing electoral outcomes, writes Gioconda Belli. “So why abandon even the fiction of free elections?”

Opinion | What Do Dictators Fear Most? Just Ask Nicaragua.

Nicaragua shows what happens when even dictators fear a rigged election.

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It has been a brutal year in Minnesota. Democrats there will soon choose between two candidates for Senate. Times Opinion asked eight experts to weigh in on the primary.

Opinion | A Voters’ Guide to the Minnesota Democratic Senate Primary

Times Opinion convened a panel of experts to help voters make sense of the race.

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"I believe this fight is not really about market share," David Ellison, chief executive of Paramount, writes in defense of his company's proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. "The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN."

Opinion | David Ellison: In Defense of the Paramount-Warner Deal

The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of CNN

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A.I. is a “powerful technology that still needs people, and putting it to use is slow, human work,” Julie Averill writes. “The sooner we are honest about that with our boards, our employees, our investors and the public, the sooner we can stop performing A.I. and start building something with it.”

Opinion | I Helped Run Lululemon. The A.I. Revolution Is a Hot Mess.

The A.I. revolution is stalling because companies don’t want to admit that integrating the technology is expensive and slow and requires human effort.

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“All too often, whatever the current executive branch of government takes on has ended badly for country and world," Peter Gilmour writes in a letter to The Times. "The work on this small body of water reflects so much more than a single botched job.”

Opinion | Another Trump Fiasco: The Reflecting Pool

Readers see the saga as a symbol of Trump administration failures. Also: Ominous plans for Head Start; land acknowledgments.

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“Intensive negotiations are urgently needed to seize the moment and end the conflict,” Thomas E. Graham writes of the Russia-Ukraine war. “Only Washington has the combination of access, leverage and political weight to lead a comprehensive diplomatic effort.”

Opinion | Trump’s Chance for Peace in Ukraine Is Real. But It Won’t Last.

There’s a narrow chance for a Russia-Ukraine peace deal before things go south.

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The culture of medicine demands answers, plans and clarity, the physician Daniela J. Lamas writes. “But when we rush to provide certainty, we risk foreclosing possibilities we cannot yet see.”

Opinion | Doctors Must Learn to Tolerate Uncertainty

When we doctors rush to provide certainty about how a patient’s disease will progress, we risk foreclosing possibilities.

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A.I. is “the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation,” our columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes.

Opinion | A Reading List for Our Age of A.I.

A.I. is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy.

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“There is nothing inherently conservative about the idea of a stipulated reading list, nor about the belief that children need to be exposed from an early age to great works of literature and to history taught chronologically,” writes James Traub.

Opinion | What Blue States Can Learn From the Texas Book List

Educational traditionalism is not the same as political conservatism.

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Many struggling Americans now find their difficulties compounded by President Trump's cuts in food stamps and health care. On a 1,000 mile road trip, I met people like Trinity Goodman, who survives by selling blood plasma, has $3.78 in her bank account. A gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/o...

Opinion | Meet the Americans Who Can’t Afford Hair Cuts or Toilet Paper (Gift Article)

Millions of Americans struggle in sometimes unimaginable ways, and Trump’s cuts in food stamps and other benefits are now making life even more precarious.

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“The U.S. government does not own shares in drug companies. It does not own shares in airlines or oil companies or meatpackers,” the editorial board writes. “It should not own shares in A.I. companies.”

Opinion | Why State Ownership of A.I. Is a Bad Idea

Taking stakes in A.I. companies would not increase the government’s powers to control those companies. The opposite is more likely.

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What President Trump’s executive orders targeting the Smithsonian “promise to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance,” our columnist M. Gessen writes.

Opinion | Trump's Smithsonian Attacks Are Attacks on America’s Future

This is how we decide who we are and who we want to be.

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“Nation-state hackers do not respect the jurisdictional lines separating federal, state and local responsibility,” Jen Easterly writes. “They search for the most vulnerable way to disrupt American life, and too often they find it in small communities that lack the resources to defend themselves.”

Opinion | Small Towns Shouldn’t Have to Defend America’s Water Supply From Iran

Local communities need Washington’s help to fight foreign hackers.

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“I do not think that world war is inevitable, nor do I think it is probable,” David French writes. “But it is more possible now than it has been at any time since the end of the Cold War, and the American government is led by the worst rulers in the modern history of the United States.”

Opinion | World War Two-and-a-Half Is Breaking Out

Whatever is happening in Iran, it isn’t working.

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“Hollywood has always been a town of dark rumors about the terrible, often abusive behavior,” Maureen Ryan writes. But there has long been “an entire system in place to keep the victims quiet and keep any revelations out of the public eye.”

Opinion | Jared Leto and Hollywood’s Open Secrets

Whispers can fester for years before anyone faces consequences. And the tactics celebrities use to escape scandal have completely changed.

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“Understanding Iran’s resilience and its capacity for defiance requires looking beyond the religious establishment to this lay revolutionary generation that helped build the regime,” writes Mehrzad Boroujerdi, whose father was killed in an attack in Ahvaz in 1978.

Opinion | This Is What My Father’s Assassination Taught Me About the War in Iran

After a lifetime of observing Iran’s revolutionary generation, I know that expecting meekness or diplomatic finesse from them is a dangerous illusion.

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“Baseball was never meant to be perfect. It’s the only game that tallies its errors,” J.R. Moehringer writes. So why has it introduced robot umpires?

Opinion | Baseball Is Weird, Illogical, Asymmetrical. Robot Umps Do Not Belong.

Can we have one small square of America that is A.I.-free?

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“The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption,” Anthony Conwright writes. “It is a ritual of national forgetting.”

Opinion | The ‘Civil War’ Is a Lie. Let’s Call It the ‘Slaveholders’ Rebellion’ Again.

To face our own history, we must be honest about it.

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Christopher Nolan’s central trick in “The Odyssey” is smuggling the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the center of an ancient Greek epic, our columnist Ezra Klein writes.

Opinion | Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul

Then he turned toward Stephen Miller.

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