'The Interview': Antony Blinken Insists He and Biden Made the Right Calls

“My life has gone rosy, again,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years had been blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, Gerald Fremlin, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up.” The judgment would prove premature. In July 2024, two months after Munro’s death at age 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her.

The actor-director discusses the long-awaited return of the hit series, the comedies that made him a star and growing up with his famous parents.

This week, President-elect Donald J. Trump asked the Supreme Court to prevent him from being sentenced in a New York criminal case and implied that he could use military force to seize control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, while President Biden did his best to try to Trump-proof his legacy. The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, David E. Sanger and Zolan Kanno-Youngs discuss the latest in the presidential transition.

Over the past 48 hours, wildfires have consumed acre after acre and building after building across greater Los Angeles. More than 100,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, and at least five people have died. The Times’s L.A. bureau chief, Corina Knoll, and our staff meteorologist, Judson Jones, explain the paths of the fires and the conditions that have made them so hard to contain.

This week, Justin Trudeau said he would step down as prime minister of Canada — a stunning downfall for a man who was once seen as a global icon of progressive politics. Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the Canada bureau chief for The New York Times, explains the forces that led to Trudeau’s collapse, and discusses the populist leader who could replace him.