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April 11, 2026 
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Good morning. What can we learn from April, a month of contradictions that never cleanly resolve themselves?
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| María Jesús Contreras |
Monthly report
It’s the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month, begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. I’m celebrating it in my own fashion, reading favorite poems about April. T.S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest month.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was equally suspicious: “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” An idiot! When I read those lines, spring fever beginning to throb in my veins, I feel like Millay is mocking me for being so awed, again, by the magnolia blossoms flinging open their floppy petals for a brief window of delirium.
To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.” Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.”
April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.”
We do. April days contain multiple seasons. There’s a lesson in there, if we want to take it, about holding multiple things at once. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, the challenge of containing conflicting emotions, conflicting ideas, the alternately sunny and stormy fronts of the internal weather system. I’ve been writing this new newsletter, The Good List (you should sign up!), and while it’s meant to catalog things that bring joy, it’s not meant to deny that there are difficult things in the world, or to avoid the inevitable contradictions that come from loving things: beautiful films about sad subjects, art that emerges from suffering. Things aren’t only good (or only bad). I often return to these lines from David Ferry’s translation of Horace: “It’s true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters; / It’s also true that Jupiter takes them away.”
Certainty is easier. April, in much of the country, is liminal, vacillating between winter and spring, refusing to resolve cleanly. If you look closely, you can observe this tension: the tulips quivering in the gusting wind; people in shorts and people wearing mittens on the same block; stepping onto the porch to see a robin and instead seeing your own breath. The internal work is much the same. Sitting quietly, paying close attention to the weather inside, you can observe the hope that blows in with the fear, the lightness and heaviness that seem to be competing. The psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach advises greeting each experience that arises within us with the phrase “this too,” accepting what’s there, even if it’s uncomfortable.
So: How are you celebrating National Poetry Month? You might listen to “The Poetry Magazine Podcast,” or, if you’re less inclined to embrace it, read the writer Ben Lerner on “The Hatred of Poetry.” Or better yet, embrace April’s spirit of contradictions and do both. While I was writing this, a friend sent me a poem by Jane Hirshfield that reminded me of poetry’s enduring potency: “Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. / Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.”
War with Iran
- Peace talks are set to begin today in Pakistan. Vice President JD Vance is leading the American delegation, which includes Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
- World leaders, trying to keep the negotiations on track, have called on Israel to halt its attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.
- The scale of the fighting in Lebanon is staggering, with more than a million people forced from their homes. See what’s happening, in photos and video.
- The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is central to the talks. But Iran has been slow to do so, in part because it can’t locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway, U.S. officials say.
- The Times has uncovered additional evidence that U.S.-made missiles struck a sports hall and school on the war’s first day. The strikes killed 21 people, including five children.
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Economy
- Prices in the U.S. rose 0.9 percent over the course of March, the highest monthly gain since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation crisis in 2022.
- Gas is getting expensive, and it’s driving prices up in seemingly far-off places like grocery stores and airports. It could strain consumer spending, which has been keeping a recession at bay.
- Still, the S&P 500 ended the week up 3.6 percent — its strongest showing since November.
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Politics
Other Big Stories
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| Bill Ingalls/NASA, via Associated Press |
- The Artemis II astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, concluding their historic 10-day mission, the first to send humans around the moon in more than 50 years.
- A 20-year-old man was arrested and accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.
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Television
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| The New York Times |
- A new season of “Euphoria” starts Sunday. Since the show’s debut in 2019, three of its stars have climbed to the top of the Hollywood A-list.
- With its focus on the possibilities and vulnerabilities of teenage girls, “The Testaments,” Hulu’s follow-up to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” feels as prescient as ever, our critic writes.
- The satirical superhero series “The Boys,” which returned to Prime Video this week, won over a broad base of fans. Its showrunner, Eric Kripke, told The Times why he felt it was time to end the story.
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Theater
- Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is back on Broadway — yet again in triumph, our critic Helen Shaw writes. (During the play’s first run, in 1949, The Times’s critic raved about it twice.)
- The singer Pink will host the Tony Awards this year. Her songs are part of the Broadway shows “& Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”
- Rosamund Pike, a star of “Gone Girl” and “Saltburn,” will make her Broadway debut this fall in the legal drama “Inter Alia.”
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More Culture
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| The New York Times |
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