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November 18, 2025

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Notable

Three university leaders on the fate of higher education in the Trump era. “As leaders, we lost our mission a bit about what higher education was about. We’re educational organizations. We’re not political organizations, like the R.N.C. or D.N.C. We’re not even social advocacy organizations.”

— Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth, in conversation

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Where will the first female president come from? “How do we squash the prejudice against female presidential nominees, which has always been with us, but became even worse after Kamala Harris got whomped by Donald Trump?”

— Gail Collins, Contributing Opinion writer

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Patti Smith on the one desire that lasts forever. “Reading her makes me interested in what life must feel like to her: What is it like to go around in Patti Smith’s mind, to be that open to experience and energy and intuition? What is the texture of the world that she lives in?”

— Ezra Klein, Opinion columnist

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Spotlight

The New York Times

‘Am I the Skinniest Person You’ve Ever Seen?’

My sister and I went on a joint diet. She stopped and I didn’t.

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ICYMI

The MAGA crackup might finally be here. “When a president becomes a drag on his party, it can have a psychological effect on partisans. Suddenly, flaws they’d barely registered come into focus.”

— Michelle Goldberg, Opinion columnist

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Listen (or Read)

The Opinions The Democrat Who Split MAGA Over the Epstein Files Ro Khanna argues that even though there is a risk in releasing the documents, it still needs to happen. 30 MIN LISTEN

More in Opinion

Guest Essay Who’s Afraid of Tucker Carlson? The Line Is Long. The price of “no enemies on the right” is going up. By Thomas B. Edsall

Guest Essay Musk Doesn’t Need $1 Trillion. Does He Even Want It? In the face of shareholders, corporate boards and even judges, Tesla’s chief executive shows what he can get away with. By William D. Cohan

Guest Essay Trump Made the Citizenship Test Harder. What if Every American Had to Take It? We should not demand ever more knowledge of newcomers and ever less of our current citizens. By James Traub

Guest Essay Nothing Succeeds With Trump Quite Like Success Ukraine understands this. Europe should get on board with it, too. By Gabrielius Landsbergis

In Your Words

Re: “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro”

So here we go again. Have we learned nothing from our failures in Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, etc.? It seems that mindless military adventurism is a truly bipartisan trait of the post-1945 American government. — A comment posted by John Smith from Springfield

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