Podcast: The Daily

This week, President Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine started the war against Russia, ordered federal agencies created by Congress to answer directly to him and installed himself as the leader of Washington’s premiere cultural institution.

The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Charlie Savage and Elisabeth Bumiller sit down to make sense of it all.

The sweeping federal corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams seemed to spell the end of his career. Then he got a sudden reprieve from President Trump — but as the terms of that support became public, an extraordinary blowback ensued.

Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The Times, walks us through the saga.

On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump and his allies left little doubt that, if they returned to power, federal workers would face layoffs, buyouts and agency closures.

Now that President Trump’s plan has become a reality, dozens of federal workers explain what it’s been like to live through it.

During less than a month in office, President Trump has pursued more trade actions against adversaries and allies than all the trade measures he took in his entire first four-year term. There is one man guiding it all: his trade adviser Peter Navarro.

Ana Swanson, who covers trade and international economics for The Times, explains why Mr. Navarro thinks tariffs will usher in a new age of American prosperity.

A few days ago, the Trump administration began blowing up America’s existing approach to ending the war in Europe by embracing Russia and snubbing Ukraine.

The shift has quickly turned into a broader assault on America’s relationship with Europe.

Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief of The Times, explains how it’s all adding up to a stunning victory for Vladimir V. Putin.

The Arizona lawmaker diagnoses what he thinks needs to change in the way his party communicates with men, Latinos and Trump voters.

Over the past week, President Donald J. Trump dramatically ceded the stage to Elon Musk in the Oval Office, turned the Democratic mayor of New York City into a political pawn and ensured that Vladimir Putin begins peace talks with Ukraine on Russia’s terms. The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, David E. Sanger and Zolan Kanno-Youngs sit down and discuss the latest week in the Trump administration.

An outbreak of bird flu has been tearing through the nation’s dairy farms and infecting more and more people. Now there are troubling signs that the United States may be closer to another pandemic, even as President Trump dismantles the country’s public health system. Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers science and global health for The Times, explains how the virus has changed and why our government might be ill-equipped to respond.

As President Trump issues executive orders that encroach on the powers of Congress — and in some cases fly in the face of established law — a debate has begun about whether he’s merely testing the boundaries of his power or triggering a full-blown constitutional crisis. Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The Times, walks us through the debate.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

As President Trump demolishes the government’ s biggest provider of foreign aid, the United States Agency for International Development, he is ending a 60-year bipartisan consensus about the best way to keep America safe from its enemies. Michael Crowley, who covers U.S. foreign policy, and Stephanie Nolen, a global health reporter for The New York Times, discuss the rise and fall of U.S.A.I.D. — and American soft power.

Over the past week, President Trump avoided a trade war with Canada and Mexico. But he escalated a trade war with China.
His reasoning? China has become more powerful in domestic manufacturing than the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Britain combined. Keith Bradsher, the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, explains why China’s dominance as a trading partner has become a threat to Trump’s agenda — and asks whether America will ever be able to catch up.

Thousands of years ago, after domesticating cows and other ruminants, humans did something remarkable: They began to consume the milk from these animals.

But living closely with animals and drinking their milk also presents risks, chief among them the increased likelihood that infections will jump from animals to people. Some of humanity’s nastiest scourges, including smallpox and measles, probably originated in domesticated animals. In the 19th century, health authorities began pushing for milk to be treated by heating it; this simple practice of pasteurizing milk would come to be considered one of the great public-health triumphs of the modern era.

Today, however, a small but growing number of Americans prefer to drink their milk raw. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, now stands at the vanguard of this movement.

The legendary actor discusses the prophecy that changed his life, his Oscar snub and his upcoming role starring alongside a “complicated” Jake Gyllenhaal in “Othello” on Broadway.

A battle between two major artists has been dominating the world of music. It’s a fight over one song — a song that may get its biggest stage ever at this weekend’s Super Bowl. Joe Coscarelli, a culture reporter for The New York Times, explains the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, how Lamar’s “Not Like Us” ripped the music world apart, and why so many fell in love with a song about hate.

How is the Democratic Party navigating the dominance of President Trump — and reckoning with the reality that more and more voters have been souring on its message?

The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Shane Goldmacher, Reid J. Epstein and Annie Karni discuss the state of the Democrats.

Guests: Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times; Reid J. Epstein, a New York Times reporter covering politics; Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent at The New York Times.

Elon Musk and his team have taken a hacksaw to the federal bureaucracy one agency at a time, and the question has become whether he’s on a crusade that will leave the government paralyzed or deliver a shake-up it has needed for years. Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times, takes us inside this hostile takeover of Washington.

North America came within hours of a multibillion dollar trade war that was poised to hobble the economies of Mexico and Canada. The Times journalists Ana Swanson, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Simon Romero discuss the last-minute negotiations that headed off the crisis — for now.

Financial markets went into a panic last week over an obscure Chinese tech start-up called DeepSeek. The company now threatens to upend the world of artificial intelligence and the race for who will dominate it. Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The Times, discusses how DeepSeek caught us all off guard.

Here’s a strange story: One day two summers ago, Jennifer Khan woke up because her arms, — both of them — hurt. Not the way they do when you’ve slept in a funny position, but as if the tendons in her forearms and hands were moving through mud. What felt like sharp electric shocks kept sparking in her fingers and sometimes up the inside of her biceps and across her chest. Holding anything was excruciating: a cup, a toothbrush, her phone. Even doing nothing was miserable. It hurt when she sat with her hands in her lap, when she stood, when she lay flat on the bed or on her side. The slightest pressure — a bedsheet, a watch band, a bra strap — was intolerable.

Our understanding of pain, and especially chronic pain, is far behind where it should be. We don’t know what causes a person with an injury to develop chronic pain, or why it happens in some people and not others, or why it happens more often in women. At a genetic and cellular level, we don’t know which systems get out of whack, or why, or how to fix them.

The psychiatrist and author of “Dopamine Nation” wants us to find balance in a world of temptation and abundance.