For Mayor Eric Adams, the challenge of leading New York City has taken on an almost absurd quality, with his administration peppered in recent weeks by a half-dozen significant resignations, four federal investigations and two federal indictments, including one against the mayor.
Two of his deputy mayors and his police commissioner have resigned. His schools chancellor was just replaced. And he withdrew his pick for the city’s top lawyer when it became clear that the City Council would reject him.
With the flood of departures and chaos leaving a considerable vacuum at the top of City Hall, Mr. Adams must now rely on a flurry of new appointees and promotions to keep a complex bureaucracy running.
Earlier this week, Mr. Adams elevated Maria Torres-Springer, a veteran civil servant, to become his new first deputy mayor. She and three other highly respected women in the administration — Camille Joseph Varlack, the mayor’s chief of staff; Meera Joshi, the deputy mayor for operations; and Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services — are expected to largely oversee City Hall’s key administrative responsibilities.
Of them, Ms. Torres-Springer will play the most critical role in the coming months, handling daily operations across a vast bureaucracy of roughly 300,000 city workers with a $100 billion annual budget.
Her promotion seemed to signal a shift from the cronyism that had typified many of Mr. Adams’s significant hires, and was celebrated by a range of civic leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton; Kathryn Wylde, the leader of a business group; and progressive officials including Chi Ossé, a City Council member who has urged Mr. Adams to resign.
How Eric Adams Could Leave Office, and Who Hopes to Succeed Him
Mr. Adams’s political future is in doubt after federal prosecutors indicted him on corruption charges in one of several inquiries ensnaring City Hall.
Tracking Charges and Investigations in Eric Adams’s Orbit
Five corruption inquiries have reached into the world of Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Here is a closer look at the charges against Mr. Adams and how people with ties to him are related to the inquiries.
How Taryn Delanie Smith, TikTok’s Heaven Receptionist, Spends Sundays
Before Taryn Delanie Smith was crowned Miss New York in 2022, she worked at a call center. At one point, she said, she was only pretending to take calls.
“I was actually making these little videos at my desk or on my way to work,” she said.
Ms. Smith, 28, is best known for her TikToks as Denise, a receptionist in heaven with a New York accent. Dressed in a robe and a towel head wrap, she welcomes newcomers and fields calls from heaven hopefuls through her headset microphone (a pink razor). In one video, Denise is drinking holy water at the Saints Lounge with Princess Diana and Whitney Houston. In another, she responds to viewers who want her to welcome their loved ones who have died.
She is a self-described “reigning chaos goblin” whose videos err on the side of comedy. Now with more than 1.4 million followers on TikTok, she creates videos full time and is a co-host of “Influenced,” a talk show on Amazon.
“I’ve never felt safer and more protected than by New Yorkers,” said Ms. Smith, who is from Seattle. “And so that is sort of what Denise embodies to me.”
Sundays, Ms. Smith said, are an anchor for her and her husband, Alec Castillo, whom she describes as a “big tatted-up dude who loves to cook.” They live with their “city cow,” a Great Dane named Bruce, in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
A Mystery Repeats: Harris Up 4 in Pennsylvania, and Trump Up 6 in Arizona
A recent rally for Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh. Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
At the end of our last wave of post-debate battleground polls, there were two state poll results that didn’t seem to fit the rest.
One was Pennsylvania: Kamala Harris led by four percentage points, making it her best result in the battlegrounds. It was our only state poll conducted immediately after the debate, when her supporters might have been especially excited to respond to a poll.
The other was Arizona: Donald J. Trump led by five points, making it his best result among the battlegrounds. Even stranger, it was a huge swing from our previous poll of the state, which Vice President Harris had led by five points.
In both cases, it seemed possible that another New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll would yield a significantly different result. With that in mind, we decided to take an additional measure of Arizona and Pennsylvania before our final polls at the end of the month.
The result? Essentially the same as our prior polls.
Ms. Harris leads by four points in Pennsylvania, just as she did immediately after the final debate.
Mr. Trump leads by six points in Arizona, about the same as the five-point lead he held three weeks ago.
Why I Changed My Birth Certificate 25 Years After I Transitioned
My wife was the one who told me that the birth certificate for Baby Girl Boylan had finally arrived in the mail in late summer. It had been a long time coming — 66 years, in fact — because Baby Girl Boylan, of course, was me.
When I transitioned nearly 25 years ago, changing my birth certificate didn’t seem necessary: I’d been able to have all my other vital records altered, from my driver’s license to my Social Security card, without that step.
I’d also declined to get my birth certificate changed because it seemed like a rewriting of the historical record. To all of the onlookers on the day I arrived — my parents, the labor and delivery nurses at Bryn Mawr Hospital — the child they delivered appeared to be male. Everything else came later, as I gained consciousness, and clarity, about who I really was.
When I thought about it (if I thought about it), I wondered what a birth certificate is for. Is it a living document that can be amended in years to come, like the Constitution, as the person it belongs to gains agency and insight? Or is it a simple statement of long-past fact — like whether, on the day I was born, it was hot or cold?
But the threat of a second Trump presidency means that having my birth certificate reflect present reality has turned into a matter of grave importance. Quite frankly, whatever is on that document may in the not so distant future determine whether one can live one’s life in peace.
In the years since my transition, many states have formalized processes by which the gender on one’s birth certificate may be changed — while others have enacted laws to make such changes impossible. In August the Texas Department of State Health Services imposed a policy that blocks transgender people from making the change, even if they have a court order allowing them to do so. It was yet another salvo in the fight against trans rights and lives, an ongoing effort to render us invisible and to make our lives as difficult as possible.
‘Are We Not Humans?’
After my reporting trip to the Chad-Sudan border and columns about the murder, rape and starvation that have devastated Sudan, readers wrote in with many thoughtful comments and questions. Here’s my effort to address some of them:
Perhaps you could help us understand the root causes of this conflict. Is the basis for this conflict between the two warring factions religious identity, Shariah law? — David Wood, Johnson City, Tenn.
The two main warring factions are rival Sudanese military branches now locked in a civil war: the Sudanese Armed Forces and a militia called the Rapid Support Forces. Imagine if the U.S. Army and a government-backed Ku Klux Klan military force joined together to stage a coup to overthrow America’s elected government, then co-ruled oppressively for a time, and finally began fighting each other while also slaughtering and starving civilians. That’s roughly the picture.
The Rapid Support Forces were responsible for most of the massacres and rapes that I described in my columns in Sudan’s Darfur region, an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago.
In Darfur, the divide is not religious, as almost all people are Sunni Muslim. Rather, it is threefold. First, the Rapid Support Forces are Arabs and target non-Arab ethnic groups. Second, those Arab attackers are mostly lighter complexioned and target Black Africans (sometimes calling them slaves or comparing them to litter or black plastic bags). Third, the Arab groups are often nomadic herders while the African tribes frequently are settled farmers, leading to conflicts over water access and grazing rights that have been exacerbated by climate change.
How can we best respond to a famine like this? Air loads of food or repairing local farming communities? — Daniel Brownstein, Berkeley, Calif.
A famine has already been declared in Sudan, and some experts fear that it could become one of the worst in history, eclipsing the 1984 famine in Ethiopia and other countries. To see starving children is searing: They do not cry or demand food but are almost expressionless, for the dying body does not expend calories on anything but keeping the major organs alive.
The best way to prevent so severe a famine in Sudan would be to end the war. But if the war continues, then we should at least press the warring parties to allow more humanitarian access. That means letting trucks bring food to communities that are starving. Doctors Without Borders reports that it has had to cut off rations for 5,000 malnourished children because warring parties are blocking attempts to resupply.
In most of the world, “to starve” is intransitive: Children starve. In Sudan, it is also transitive: Warlords starve children. The U.S. should use intelligence community resources to monitor atrocities and release intercepts and images to hold warring parties accountable and end the impunity.
This Election Will Need More Heroes
True political courage — the principled stand, the elevation of country over party pressure, the willingness to sacrifice a career to protect the common good — has become painfully rare in a polarized world. It deserves to be celebrated and nurtured whenever it appears, especially in defense of fundamental American institutions like our election system. The sad truth, too, is the country will probably need a lot more of it in the coming months.
In state after state, Republicans have systematically made it harder for citizens to vote, and harder for the election workers who count those votes to do so. They are challenging thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas, forcing administrators to manually restore perfectly legitimate voters to the rolls. They are aggressively threatening election officials who defended the 2020 election against manipulation. They are trying to invalidate mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they meet the legal requirements of a postmark before the deadline. They are making it more difficult to certify election results, and even trying to change how states apportion their electors, in hopes of making it easier for Donald Trump to win or even help him overturn an election loss.
Though many of these moves happened behind closed doors, this campaign is hardly secret. And last month, Mr. Trump directly threatened to prosecute and imprison election officials around the country who disagree with his lies.
Against this kind of systematic assault on the institutions and processes that undergird American democracy, the single most important backstop are the public servants, elected and volunteer, who continue to do their jobs.
Consider Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator from Nebraska, who showed how it’s done when he announced last month that he would not bow to an intense, last-minute pressure campaign by his party’s national leaders, including former President Trump, to help slip an additional electoral vote into Mr. Trump’s column.
Currently, Nebraska awards most of its electors by congressional district, and while most of the state is safely conservative, polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris poised to win the elector from the Second Congressional District, which includes the state’s biggest city, Omaha. In the razor-thin margins of the 2024 election, this could be the vote that determines the outcome. That was the intent of Republican lawmakers in Nebraska, who waited until it was too late for Democrats in Maine, which has a similar system, to change the state’s rules to prevent one congressional district from choosing a Republican elector.
Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?
Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”
That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?
Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.
I asked James Carville if Kamala’s problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of color. The Ragin’ Cajun chided me.
“We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and Election Day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”
Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington.”
Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.
For Trump and Harris, the Media Future Is Now
In 2015, Barack Obama submitted to interviews with three YouTube stars, one of whom was notable for eating cereal out of a bathtub. It was a moment that opened a window into the media landscape of the future, after the mainstream media as we have known it — while also making that future seem basically absurd.
A year later Donald Trump won the White House, and there was a rush to find the sources of his victory in the darker reaches of the internet, in misinformation factories and troll farms. It was another window into the media future — but this time the future seemed dystopian, a realm of propaganda and manipulation.
In 2024, the media future doesn’t need to be seen through a glass darkly: For the younger generation of news consumers, it has basically arrived. But it isn’t embodied by cereal-eating YouTubers, Russian-funded disinformation operations or even the Silicon Valley-enforced progressive censorship that many conservatives feared four years ago.
Instead it’s embodied by the sex-and-relationships podcaster and the bro comedians who scored important interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this month — with the host of “Call Her Daddy,” Alex Cooper, tossing Harris questions about abortion and student loans, while the comics Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh chatted with Trump about his nicknaming strategy on their show, “Flagrant.”
As a conservative with an interest in moral decline, I was familiar with “Call Her Daddy,” but I confess I had never heard of “Flagrant” before clips from the Trump interview started populating my social media feed. Which is par for the course for this campaign: The nominees and their running mates have consistently submitted to interviews with shows and personalities who were barely on my radar screen.
There’s an impulse to interpret these media arrivistes as reinventions of the prior media dispensation — to cast a big podcaster like Joe Rogan as a muscled Walter Cronkite for the online age, or to frame appearances on “Call Her Daddy” and “Flagrant” as base mobilization operations, akin to appearing on “The Rachel Maddow Show” or “Hannity.”
Okan Buruk: “Fatih Terim’in Sözleri Bana Olabilir”
Does Your School Use Suicide Prevention Software? We Want to Hear From You.
In response to the youth mental health crisis, many school districts are investing in software that monitors what students type on their school devices, alerting counselors if a child appears to be contemplating suicide or self-harm.
Such tools — produced by companies like Gaggle, GoGuardian Beacon, Bark and Securly — can pick up what a child types into a Google search, or a school essay, or an email or text message to a friend. Some of these alerts may be false alarms, set off by innocuous research projects or offhand comments, but the most serious alerts may prompt calls to parents or even home visits by school staff members or law enforcement.
I write about mental health for The New York Times, including the effects of social media use on children’s brains and algorithms that predict who is at risk for suicide. I’m interested in knowing more about how these monitoring tools are working in real life.
If you are a student, parent, teacher or school administrator, I’d like to hear about your experiences. Do you think these tools have saved lives? Do they help students who are anxious or depressed get the care they need? Are you concerned about students’ privacy? Is there any cost to false positives?
I will read each submission and may use your contact information to follow up with you. I will not publish any details you share without contacting you and verifying your information.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.