The ground stop that brought air travel across the country to a halt Friday evening highlighted persistent weaknesses in the Federal Aviation Administration’s aging air traffic control infrastructure, which has had several disruptive failures in recent months.
Two months ago, a circuit failure and severed fiber optic cable caused crippling ground stops and delays at airports along the East Coast. Smaller outages unfolded in October at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina and George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, when contractors accidentally cut into fiber line.
The Friday ground stop, which was only the third the F.A.A. has issued this century, eclipsed the fallout of previous air traffic communications equipment failures. Officials said it was prompted by efforts to replace an outdated router, which caused circuits in the national air traffic network to become overloaded and fail, interrupting communication lines between air traffic controllers and pilots.
By Saturday, thousands of flights had been canceled, and airports were still crowded with stranded travelers. The recovery will most likely take days, as airlines rebook passengers and reposition planes.
Friday’s breakdown, and the earlier episodes, have underscored the structural vulnerabilities that hamper controllers’ ability to safely manage flight traffic, even after improvements. And they have raised questions about whether federal authorities have done enough to create backup systems to prevent disruptive or catastrophic failures.
Friday’s incident touched off a blame game in Washington. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, accused Congress of failing to pony up for systemwide upgrades.
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html Karoun Demirjian Nationwide Ground Stops (Aviation)|Airlines and Airplanes|Regulation and Deregulation of Industry|Air Traffic Control|Federal Aviation Administration|Homeland Security Department|House of Representatives|Newark Liberty International Airport (NJ)|Transportation Department (US)|Duffy, Sean P|Mullin, Markwayne 1794694242 Trump Kept Out of Sight as F.A.A. Issued Flight Ground Stop https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/us/politics/trump-flights-air-traffic-social-media.html
With flights grounded for nearly five hours Friday evening, Americans heard from the homeland security secretary. They heard from the transportation secretary. They did not hear from President Trump.
At least not about the nationwide ground stop, the first major crisis the federal government has faced since the midterm elections. The halt grounded or delayed some 10,000 flights from coast to coast and confirmed what experts have been warning for years: that the nation’s flight safety system is perilously fragile.
Instead, the president, who remained behind the scenes at the White House, posted messages to social media that night on other topics.
“MAKE OUR ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY GREAT AGAIN!” he wrote on Truth Social, in the middle of the crisis, calling for tax incentives to lure movie production back to the United States.
The absence of Mr. Trump, who has made few public appearances since Democrats swept the midterms, seemed notable enough that Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, sought to assure the nation in the heat of the crisis on Friday night that the president was fully engaged, if not in his more common spot in front of the cameras.
“This is what President Trump does,” Mr. Mullin said in a news conference. “He puts leaders in place, and he allows them to lead. They even ask, you know, why is the president not talking? It’s because he’s allowed Secretary Duffy and us to go out there and explain to you what took place.” He was referring to Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, who appeared beside Mr. Mullin on Friday night.
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html Luke Broadwater United States Politics and Government|Airlines and Airplanes|Nationwide Ground Stops (Aviation)|Aviation Accidents, Safety and Disasters|Federal Aviation Administration|Homeland Security Department|Transportation Department (US)|Duffy, Sean P|Greene, Marjorie Taylor (1974- )|Mullin, Markwayne|Trump, Donald J|Washington (DC)|United States 1794694862 After Relative Silence, Joe Rogan Said MAGA Has Lost the “Podcast Bros” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/style/after-relative-silence-joe-rogan-said-trumps-policies-have-lost-the-podcast-bros.html
In the aftermath of the midterm wipeout for Republicans, Joe Rogan, the nation’s top podcaster, has not had a lot to say about politics, instead focusing his program on topics such as Hobbit-like hominids and dinosaurs, which he wanted to assure people were real.
But on Friday, Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024 and was seen as crucial in his winning over young male voters, had a harsh assessment of the president’s policies, as well as, seemingly, his place among male podcasters like himself.
“They didn’t just lose the podcast bros,” Rogan said. “They lost most of the country.”
He continued, saying support had frayed when the Trump administration got “into a war that no one wants to be in,” referring to the war in Iran, and put “militarized police in the streets wearing masks,” a reference to the ongoing crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Rogan’s remarks came just two days after he expressed disgust at politics in another broadcast — “It’s all gross; I hate it,” Rogan said Wednesday, adding, “I don’t like politics at all” — and had largely avoided discussing the midterm elections.
His relative silence had been surprising given the level of influence he and other “manosphere” influencers were credited with in the 2024 election, when young men banked to the right to help carry Republicans to victory in what some called “the podcast election.”
Theo Von, another popular podcaster, who hosted Trump on his show in August 2024, had also been largely mute on the election. This week’s episode of his show, “This Past Weekend,” for instance, featured a happiness expert.
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html Jesse McKinley Presidential Election of 2024|Right-Wing Extremism and Alt-Right|Midterm Elections (2026)|Podcasts|Immigration and Emigration|Republican Party|Rogan, Joe|Von, Theo|Trump, Donald J|Walsh, Matt (1964- ) 1794692772 Perhaps the Rumors of Democracy’s Demise Were Premature https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/magazine/democracy-midterm-elections.html
Before the midterms this month, experts who measure the health of democracies saw the United States experiencing “the most dramatic decline in American history,” in the words of one global index.
Warnings also came from judges ruling on election-related cases. In late October, Judge David O. Carter blocked the Justice Department from ordering California officials to segregate the ballots of 20,000 voters who were on a list of suspected noncitizens that Carter found to be unreliable. “If the executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” he wrote.
Against the backdrop of such fears, the November election became not just a referendum on President Trump, but also a crucial test of American democracy. In the end, the country passed. Turnout was the second highest for a midterm in more than a century, and Republicans, including Trump, have accepted the results. Even this week, when Democrat Scott Colom was declared the winner of the tight race for Senate in Mississippi, there were no challenges or protests in the historically Republican state.
Does one free and fair election mean the concerns that preceded it were overblown? There’s little question that Trump’s hyperaggressive use of presidential power and his family’s self-enrichment have served as a shock to the county’s democratic traditions. But the election suggests that American democracy has the resources to heal. The point is not that Democrats were the victors. It’s that the popular will won and reflected a wholesale turn against the administration in power.
Leading up to the midterms, scholars debated whether the country was sliding into a soft form of authoritarianism in Trump’s second term, akin to Hungary under former Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The answer was yes, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way argued in an article published in October. They cited Trump’s leveraging of federal power to cow law firms, prosecute political opponents, pressure news media outlets to alter their coverage, and steer political donations toward his own super PACs. It was all an effort to entrench himself and his party in power, Levitsky and Way wrote, as was Trump’s mid-decade gerrymandering push.
On the other side of the debate, Kurt Weyland, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while Trump was transgressive, he was not transforming the U.S. government into an authoritarian regime. For the most part, the laws and traditions protecting free expression and civil society blocked his undemocratic initiatives. The United States was not turning into Hungary under Orban or Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The mayor of Istanbul is sitting in prison” for opposing Erdogan, Weyland said. “James Talarico isn’t in prison.” In fact, he is headed to the Senate.
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html Emily Bazelon United States Politics and Government|Midterm Elections (2026)|Democracy (Theory and Philosophy)|Politics and Government|Authoritarianism (Theory and Philosophy)|Presidential Power (US)|Courts and the Judiciary|Trump, Donald J|United States 1794650509 Top Democrat Eyes Filibuster-Proof Budget Bill to Unlock Affordability Agenda https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/us/politics/house-democrats-affordability-costs-budget.html
A top House Democrat mapping out how to leverage his party’s vast majorities in Congress next year to push through a sweeping economic agenda is considering using a filibuster-proof bill to muscle it through both chambers and to President Trump’s desk.
The approach, outlined by Representative Brendan Boyle, the Pennsylvania Democrat in line to be chairman of the House Budget Committee in January, would be one way of forcing Mr. Trump to either embrace or veto broadly popular measures to lower living costs.
Triumphant after electoral victories delivered them more than 255 seats in the House and at least 55 seats in the Senate, Democrats are weighing the best strategy for quickly delivering the affordability agenda they promised voters, including tackling the soaring costs of health care, child care and housing.
Mr. Boyle, the 49-year-old son of a janitor for Pennsylvania’s transportation authority and a school crossing guard, is now positioned to lead the way from his perch at the helm of the House panel that handles budget matters and sets spending priorities.
In an interview, Mr. Boyle said it was “worth exploring” using budget reconciliation — a tool that allows the party in power to bypass opposition from the minority and push through fiscal legislation on majority votes — to unlock the affordability agenda Democrats ran on, including reversing Medicaid cuts Republicans enacted unilaterally in 2025.
“I think any time we can pass good, popular, meaningful legislation, that only strengthens our hand in any ultimate negotiation with the White House,” Mr. Boyle said.
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html Catie Edmondson United States Politics and Government|Federal Budget (US)|National Debt (US)|Cost of Living and Affordability|Midterm Elections (2026) 1794698709 Jensen Huang Carried a Secret for More Than a Year. It Led to His Downfall. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/technology/jensen-huang-nvidia-board.html
Jensen Huang was agitated.
It was September 2025, and The New York Times had just called his company about a Singaporean data center firm called Megaspeed that had been led by a Chinese woman named Alice Huang, or Huang Le. The Times was reporting that Mr. Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, had a close relationship with her.
Mr. Huang, who Nvidia employees say could have a volcanic temper, wanted to know what The Times was insinuating. Though he didn’t deny that he knew the woman, he was bothered by the suggestion that they might be close, people familiar with the discussion said.
Nvidia mounted an aggressive defense. Madison Huang, Mr. Huang’s daughter who acted as her father’s chief of staff, pressed the company’s communications team to push back forcefully. They also had reinforcements, a crisis communications firm called Heller.
They insisted that Mr. Huang and the woman from Megaspeed just had a business relationship.
Over the next 13 months, Mr. Huang stuck with his story, even after The Times reported last month that the U.S. had gathered intelligence showing that Ms. Huang was secretly working with China’s top spy agency.
But last weekend, facing new revelations about the relationship, Mr. Huang finally came clean to Nvidia’s general counsel. He had been having an affair with the woman, after all, said the people familiar with the discussions.
The relationship with the Megaspeed executive wasn’t Mr. Huang’s only secret.
On Wednesday, a Times reporter called Mr. Huang to ask him about a second extramarital relationship. This time, it was an affair with an executive who reported to him.
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html Tripp Mickle, Ana Swanson, Paul Mozur, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes and Maggie Haberman Artificial Intelligence|International Relations|Espionage and Intelligence Services|Boards of Directors|Adultery|Computer Chips|Surveillance of Citizens by Government|Megaspeed International Pte Ltd|Ministry of State Security of the People's Republic of China|New York Times|NVIDIA Corporation|Huang, Alice (Technology Executive)|Huang, Jen-Hsun|Trump, Donald J|China 1794689858 Tech Leaders Rally Behind Jensen Huang https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/technology/silicon-valley-nvidia-jensen-huang.html
Many of Silicon Valley’s executives and investors are rallying behind Jensen Huang, who resigned as Nvidia’s chief executive on Thursday after revelations that he had affairs with an employee and with a woman whom U.S. officials believed to be a spy for China.
In social media posts and letters to Nvidia’s board of directors, Mr. Huang’s billionaire peers described him as a singular leader who could not be replaced at Nvidia. Mr. Huang’s exit, they argued, would set the United States back in the artificial intelligence race. And they blamed Nvidia’s board for bowing to pressure.
“Jensen drove supply chain brilliantly at Nvidia, but many of those deals were a handshake with Jensen, not a written contract,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive and the richest person in the world, said in a social media post on Saturday. “Without Jensen, at least some of those critical deals will be lost.”
The support put a spotlight on Nvidia’s role as the linchpin of the A.I. boom and on Mr. Huang’s leadership as the company grew into one of the most valuable in the world. Nvidia, which started making computer chips for video games, now controls an estimated 90 percent of the market for the advanced chips used in the big A.I. projects that are driving the U.S. economy. Along the way, Mr. Huang became Silicon Valley’s consummate dealmaker, turning Nvidia into a central banker for start-ups that needed chips and funding.
“We believe the board should avoid a rush to replace Jensen that undermines and thwarts the best interests of shareholders,” Brad Gerstner, the chief executive of Altimeter Capital Management, and Gavin Baker, the chief investment officer of Atreides Management, wrote in a letter sent on Friday. The investors, whose firms are Nvidia shareholders, asked the company’s board to consider “all options on the table, including the potential return of Jensen Huang.”
An open letter to Nvidia’s board, titled “Stand With Jensen,” asked the board to reinstall Mr. Huang as chief executive, to conduct an independent investigation and to explain its actions. As of Saturday morning, the letter had nearly 100,000 signatures, including by current and former employees of Nvidia, business partners like Mr. Musk, and start-up leaders and shareholders including Garry Tan, the chief executive of the venture capital firm Y Combinator.
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html Kalley Huang Appointments and Executive Changes|Boards of Directors|Artificial Intelligence|Ethics and Official Misconduct|NVIDIA Corporation 1794708251 Judge Blocks Immediate Closure of East Potomac Park for Trump Golf Project https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/us/politics/trump-east-potomac-golf-course.html
A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from shuttering East Potomac Park in Washington, finding that the proposed closure appeared to be intended to start the process of transforming the area into a championship golf course.
President Trump had announced that the municipal golf course and park would close on Sunday, ahead of the renovation work that he had called for. The ruling by Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia means the park will remain open for now.
In her 30-page order, Judge Reyes said that the Trump administration would not be responsible for operating the course while the case proceeds, but required the golf courses, paths and picnic areas in the park to remain “open and accessible to the public.”
Judge Reyes has for months been overseeing combative litigation over the future of the Washington park and golf course. A preservationist organization and local golfers sued in February, arguing that the project threatened to destroy a historic course that remained a cheap and accessible option for recreational players.
She had issued a series of rulings focused on a narrower dispute over whether the administration could clear out trees at the site. Saturday’s order was her first blocking work more generally at the park.
It came amid a larger standoff in which Judge Reyes has repeatedly accused administration officials of concealing their efforts to move forward with Mr. Trump’s ideas.
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html Zach Montague United States Politics and Government|Decisions and Verdicts|Golf|Courts and the Judiciary|Interior Department|Justice Department|Reyes, Ana C|Trump, Donald J|East Potomac Park (Washington, DC) 1794692432 Key Witness in Comey Case Attests to Justice Dept.’s Aggressive Tactics https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/nyregion/key-witness-in-comey-case-attests-to-justice-depts-aggressive-tactics.html
For more than a year, the Justice Department has gone hard after James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, using an array of rule-bending tactics in an effort to satisfy President Trump’s drive to see him charged.
In the three cases filed against Mr. Comey so far, prosecutors have improperly used search warrants to get evidence, made glaring errors in front of a grand jury and enlisted a mafia hit man in an effort to prove that Mr. Comey had broken the law.
They also considered treating The New York Times as Mr. Comey’s co-conspirator in a leak prosecution in what appeared to be a bid to breathe new life into accusations that might otherwise have been barred by the statute of limitations.
On Friday night, a new court filing added additional details to a portrait of belligerence, showing just how far investigators have been willing to roam in their pursuit of Mr. Comey.
This summer, the filing said, prosecutors hauled two workers at a New York apartment building in front of a grand jury in Florida after they refused to let an F.B.I. agent inside to serve a subpoena on one of its residents — a longtime confidant of Mr. Comey’s from whom the government wanted testimony.
The prosecutors also threatened to charge the confidant, Daniel C. Richman, with obstruction of justice for supposedly evading the subpoena, though he says that his lawyers had already agreed to accept it on his behalf.
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html Alan Feuer United States Politics and Government|Suits and Litigation (Civil)|Federal Bureau of Investigation|Justice Department|Comey, James B|Trump, Donald J 1794696351 When Disaster Hit Next Door in Flatbush https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/nyregion/flatbush-building-collapse-neighbors.html
Sheena Coleman turned 35 on Wednesday afternoon, and was looking forward to a night out. At around 4 p.m. she was at home in her second-floor apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her 6-year-old son, Hakeem, picking up things from the floor. Her 13-year-old daughter, Zariah, was out at the park, enjoying a school holiday. Their fussy cat, Issac, was somewhere in the next room.
Then Ms. Coleman felt everything shake.
She heard a roar from the direction of the children’s bedroom. Dust was somehow entering the apartment.
She darted into the room. There was a gaping space — “a big, big hole”— right above her daughter’s bed.
The children liked to lean against that wall to watch TV. Now it was letting in daylight.
That didn’t make sense. There was a building next door.
In her memory of those frantic moments, Ms. Coleman picked up Hakeem and swung him onto her hip. She then put him back down, and stepped out the door of her unit to where the hallway should have been.
That’s when the truth of what happened revealed itself.
“I could see the street,” Ms. Coleman recalled on Friday in an interview. “I could hear people screaming, ‘Get out! Get out!’”
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html Michael Wilson and Kaja Andric Accidents and Safety|Brooklyn (NYC)|Flatbush (Brooklyn, NY) 1794667732 Brooklyn Building Collapse Tragedy Devastates Immigrant Families https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/nyregion/building-collapse-brooklyn-immigrants.html
Theirs was a story as old as New York. On a street in Brooklyn, immigrants had arrived to work and live, until their lives intersected in tragedy.
They had landed in New York City after long journeys from Latin America and West Africa. Some had found work on a construction site in Brooklyn. Others, a home in the apartment building next door.
Two of the young men toiling at the construction site were from Ecuador, another was from Guatemala. All had arrived only a few years ago, all were fathers in their 20s hoping to provide for their young children.
Next door, in the building with four apartments, there were immigrants from Guinea — an Amazon worker, a food delivery driver — and families from Colombia, including a family of four that had just moved there after saving enough money to abandon a migrant shelter.
On Wednesday, their lives collided in a spasm of devastation.
Most, if not all, of the people whose lives changed in an instant when the apartment building tumbled into the construction site were immigrants.
All eight who perished, including three workers at the construction site and two children from Colombia who lived in the building, were born outside the United States. So were many of the 18 people who were injured.
The collapse of the building in the Flatbush neighborhood captivated the world, in part, because it reflected the world.
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html Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Ana Ley Accidents and Safety|Building (Construction)|Foreign Workers|Buildings (Structures)|Flatbush, Brooklyn, Building Collapse (2026)|Deaths (Fatalities)|Workplace Hazards and Violations|Real Estate and Housing (Residential)|Immigration and Emigration|Brooklyn (NYC)|Flatbush (Brooklyn, NY)|New York City|New York Metropolitan Area|United States 1794697210 In the Rubble of a Fallen Building, He Rescued a 2-Year-Old https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/nyregion/building-collapse-brooklyn-boy-rescue.html
Miguel Tigsilema was on his third day working at a construction site in Brooklyn, leveling dirt in a corner of the pit with his shovel, when he heard what sounded like enormous tree trunks breaking in half.
He turned to look behind him and saw the building next to the site tumbling down. He took off running, his helmet flying off as he raced for the street. He tripped and fell, the dust of the collapse blinding and choking him.
Mr. Tigsilema got up and scrambled to the street, where he screamed at passers-by to call for help.
He paused, grateful to be alive.
He looked back down at the pit and thought of his fellow workers who might be trapped in the rubble.
“I had just been thinking of saving myself,” Mr. Tigsilema, 35, a father of three who was born in Ecuador, said in an interview. “God gave me the strength and courage to go back.”
That was when he heard a woman’s muffled screams.
“Help me,” he remembered her calling out. “Save my children.”
He could see a tiny hand through the debris. Mr. Tigsilema and other workers from the site began to dig with their hands.
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html Maria Cramer and Luis Ferré-Sadurní Accidents and Safety|Building (Construction)|Rescues|Buildings (Structures)|Fire Department (NYC)|Brooklyn (NYC)|Workplace Hazards and Violations 1794651307 Olivia Wilde Hit Bottom. Here’s How She Bounced Back. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/magazine/olivia-wilde-interview.html
When the actor-director Olivia Wilde was last in the public eye, around the time of her 2022 dystopian thriller, “Don’t Worry Darling,” things weren’t going very well. Wilde had to deal with the twin fallout of decidedly mixed critical reaction and a harsh wave of tabloid attention. The film was plagued by reports of feuding between Wilde and her star, Florence Pugh. Wilde was also hounded online for her relationship, which has since ended, with the pop star Harry Styles, who played a supporting role in the movie. If that wasn’t enough, the press cycle for “Don’t Worry Darling” brought with it continuing scrutiny over her 2020 breakup with her longtime partner, Jason Sudeikis, with whom she has two children. This year, though, it has all been very different.
“The Invite,” a painfully perceptive domestic sex comedy that Wilde, who is 42, directed and co-starred in, has been one of the year’s sleeper hits. She followed that up by playing, to delicious effect, a sexually domineering and manipulative art-world star in the director Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex.” And she’s capping her year off with a small but scene-stealing role as an angrily spurned lover in the upcoming “Behemoth!” starring Pedro Pascal and directed by Tony Gilroy. I spoke to Wilde last month in London, where she was prepping her next directorial effort, a Christmas comedy called “Naughty,” about what it’s like to hit a low and how she so dramatically turned things around in her work and life.
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I was thinking about the three roles you played this year in “The Invite,” “I Want Your Sex” and “Behemoth!” All these characters are tightly wound, and I wondered if being a director has changed how you see yourself as an actor. Being a director freed me up to not feel pressure to be the ideal ingénue growing into the idealized female character in any film. I now choose roles from a much more curious place. But I hadn’t put together that these three characters are extremely high-strung in different ways. My character in “I Want Your Sex” felt like she was on the opposite end of the spectrum of femininity as my character in “The Invite.” They’re both movies dealing with the idea of sex and sexuality and desire and eroticism from two completely different perspectives.
Why are you interested in exploring questions of sex and identity at this point in your life? It’s funny. I turned 40 a couple of years ago, and I suddenly felt more present in my body and more connected to my sense of confidence and sexuality than ever. We were told for a long time that that’s when things start shutting down. Less is available to you in terms of your career, in terms of your exploration of your own identity, sexuality. Yet every woman I know from like 40 to 70 has told me: “Oh, no. That’s when you really understand yourself.” You’re so much more honest with yourself, and there’s an awesome blossoming that happens at that point. So I think I was curious about inspecting that in different ways and particularly in comedies, because it’s good to laugh at this stuff.
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html David Marchese Movies|Sex|Actors and Actresses|Content Type: Personal Profile|Parenting|Dating and Relationships|Maxim (Magazine)|Araki, Gregg|Cruz, Penelope|Ephron, Nora|Pascal, Pedro|Perel, Esther (1958- )|Pugh, Florence|Rogen, Seth|Styles, Harry|Wilde, Olivia|Behemoth! (Movie)|Don't Worry Darling (Movie)|The Invite (Movie)|I Want Your Sex (Movie)|Divorce, Separations and Annulments|Sudeikis, Jason 1794688529 Talarico Wants to Transcend the Pettiness of Modern Politics. Can He? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/opinion/talarico-midterms-trump-washington.html
On Thursday, James Talarico gave his first speech since his commanding victory in Texas’ Senate race. Speaking at a Democratic conference in Denver, he expressed his sincere eagerness to work with Donald Trump. Invoking Lyndon Baines Johnson, he said: “If President Trump wants the same plaques and portraits and busts as L.B.J., we can help make that a reality. We should make the final two years of his presidency the most productive of any presidency in American history, because this moment is so much bigger and so much more important than the red team or the blue team.”
I found this comment slightly jarring. Talarico isn’t the first Democrat to make overtures to Trump: New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has leveraged Trump’s strange affection for him to help the city, and Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan has offered to call universal health care “Trumpcare.” But both Mamdani and El-Sayed address the president with a touch of irony, making clear they know they’re playing to his vanity. Talarico, by contrast, sounded as though he really thought Trump might be willing to help Democrats help the country. How, I asked him afterward, could he believe that?
“We have a president who says he cares about working people,” Talarico said. “We now have a large majority of senators and House members who got elected talking about the needs of working people. So to me, that’s a recipe to get a lot done for the working people in my state and across this country. Of course, it may not work. There’s plenty of reasons to be cynical, but there were a lot of reasons to be cynical about this race in Texas. We said from the very beginning that a little bit of hope is a dangerous thing, and so we’re doubling down on that little bit of hope.”
It was an answer that spoke to a central tension in Talarico’s campaign. He ran as both a fighter and a unifier, winning support from people who’d voted for Trump and from people who wanted protection from him. He’d sometimes tell his team, “You can’t beat them at their game. You have to change the game.” By this, he meant that he’d try to transcend the meanness and pettiness of modern politics. “We needed to adopt a new political consciousness, and that was really around unity, healing and love,” he told me. But it’s an open question how much unity, healing and love is possible in Trump’s Washington.
From the beginning, Talarico wanted to change culture as well as policy. The seeds of his campaign were planted in the spring of 2025, when he was in a dark place. As a state representative, he had, along with his Texas House colleague Gina Hinojosa, led the opposition to Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to use vouchers to divert public money to private schools. In the previous session, a group of Republicans, many from rural areas where public schools are at the center of community life, had joined Democrats to thwart the measure. But after Abbott backed successful primary campaigns against some of the Republican holdouts, school vouchers became law.
“When we lost, he was kind of going through a big psychological crisis,” said Talarico’s chief of staff in the legislature, also, confusingly, named Gina Hinojosa. “Like, how could this possibly happen? It was so obvious that this was bad for Texas voters.”
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html Michelle Goldberg United States Politics and Government|Senate|Democratic Party|Midterm Elections (2026)|Talarico, James|Texas 1794657616 Jensen Huang’s Fall Is a Dark Consequence of What’s Happening in Silicon Valley https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/opinion/jensen-huang-donald-trump-silicon-valley.html
It is easy to attribute Jensen Huang’s abrupt fall to his lapses in judgment — including his growing list of extramarital dalliances — but Nvidia’s woes are a symptom of a much bigger problem.
Silicon Valley finds itself increasingly under the control of a handful of dominant chieftains and investors. And as these extraordinarily powerful executives grow closer to President Trump, the dark consequences of the wheeling and dealing are coming to the fore.
These problems are serious, but they are hardly new. Through much of this country’s history, particularly in the early 1900s, many American companies operated under similar conditions, dominated by powerful chief executives and controlling shareholders who faced few checks on their behavior. Over time, scandals, crisis and economic strain compelled regulators and public shareholders to demand more rigorous safeguards to protect the economic interests of everyday investors. This pressure led to many of the rules we take for granted today. Publicly traded companies must have an independent board of directors to hold executives accountable; they must disclose their operations clearly and in full; shareholders have rights. Such rules didn’t end all crises, but they made corporations well equipped to deal with them.
In the past decade and a half, the rules began to weaken, as several presidential administrations relaxed corporate regulations. Some of the changes occurred for good reasons: to reduce the cost for a company to take itself public, to encourage innovation, and to ease costly compliance and reporting requirements. Other changes derived from less defensible motives, such as an increased tolerance among investors, boards and regulators for concentrated founder control.
Few industries have taken this shift further than Silicon Valley. You can see the seeds of the problem in the many origin stories of its most successful companies: a brilliant founder, toiling perhaps in his garage, possessed with a singular vision and focus. Over time, even investors came to regard successful founders as something akin to mystical geniuses who could not be replaced. If a company loses its founder, it is lost forever. In such a mind-set, board members and shareholders give leaders pretty much whatever they want. The gushers of money flooding the biggest companies keep investors satiated, further entrenching this practice.
That explains why some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies are basically authoritarian realms. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, is one of many successful founders who were granted a special class of stock that gives them effective control over their companies’ futures; the founders of Anthropic have proposed a similar arrangement ahead of their initial public offering, giving them collectively a majority of voting power, though they would own a much smaller share of the company. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has a similar arrangement.
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html Amit Seru and David Larcker Boards of Directors|United States Politics and Government|Stocks and Bonds|Regulation and Deregulation of Industry|Executives and Management (Theory)|Appointments and Executive Changes|Artificial Intelligence|Authoritarianism (Theory and Philosophy)|Ethics and Official Misconduct|Commerce Department|Megaspeed International Pte Ltd|NVIDIA Corporation|Huang, Jen-Hsun|Trump, Donald J|China|Singapore 1794702992 SpaceX Makes History With Successful Rocket Catch in Texas https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/science/spacex-starship-first-catch.html
SpaceX’s giant Starship spacecraft pulled off a remarkable feat on Saturday afternoon in the quest to build fully reusable rockets. For the first time, the spacecraft successfully returned from orbit to its launch site in South Texas, where it was caught between two mechanical arms on the launch tower.
For the past decade, SpaceX has successfully landed the boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets and then reused them on subsequent launches. But the upper stages of the Falcon 9s are still thrown away each time.
The Starship rocket system is not only much larger than Falcon 9, but it was designed from the start to be fully reusable. Bringing back an upper stage from orbit is a major technical hurdle, and SpaceX was able to pull it off on its first try.
Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, offered his congratulations on X. “Making more believers by the day….one step closer to,” he wrote, adding an emoji of the moon and the American flag. Starship is slated to serve as one of two lander designs that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, posted a video on X showing a view of Starship from below, part of the post-landing inspection.
A few hours earlier, the spacecraft, which is about 170 feet long, had been traveling at more than 17,000 miles per hour at an altitude of 170 miles. Then, one of its engines fired briefly, nudging it out of orbit to begin its fall back to Earth.
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html Kenneth Chang Space and Astronomy|Rocket Science and Propulsion|Private Spaceflight|Artemis Program|Space Exploration Technologies Corp|Musk, Elon|Starbase (Tex)