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By the time I was 19 years old, I had quit college and was working a job thousands of miles from my family. With no money, my first Thanksgiving away from home promised to be a lonely one—until a local couple invited me to spend the holiday at their house with their extended family. They warned me, however, that this gathering would also include a ne’er-do-well cousin named Jeffrey.

One morning earlier this month, I slammed my laptop shut. I was four cups of coffee deep and full of rage. My hands shook, and my vision blurred. It wasn’t politics, my usual subject matter, that had sent me spiraling.
It was Wyna Liu.
Liu is the New York Times editor who makes Connections, the online puzzle that is both the blessing and the bane of my mornings—and the days of millions of other people who regularly spend time tangling with Liu’s creation.

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We warned you last month to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula.” In a recent study conducted about consumer products, researchers concluded kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants, which you do not want anywhere near your hot food.

By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings.

On Tuesday, Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon, agreed to a cease-fire. The arrangement is a win for outgoing President Joe Biden, who has followed a hapless policy course through a calamitous year for the Middle East.
Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Biden administration’s goal in the Middle East has been to contain the conflict.

When Mean Girls, the musical remake of the 2004 film, hit theaters in January, the film appeared to shock audiences for, well, being a musical. Theatergoers recorded the moment that their fellow viewers realized what kind of movie it was; in one video, the crowd groans loudly as soon as a character starts singing, before laughing at their own reactions. But the studio behind the remake wasn’t surprised by these responses.

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Sometimes, at a party or on the internet, you will encounter someone who is unimpressed by human ingenuity. The pace of technological progress has stalled, they’ll say. Our art is getting dumber. We aren’t as creative as we used to be.