The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
12 January 2025 - 1 hour 1 min“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 li...
Series Episodes
'The Interview': What Is YouTube’s Dominance Doing to Us? We Asked Its C.E.O.
Neal Mohan on A.I. slop, parental controls and his platform’s impact on our lives.
53 mins
28 March Finished
The View of the War From a Florida Gas Station
For the past four weeks, soaring gas prices across the United States have become a symbol of the domestic impact of the war in Iran. Cameron Joudi, who owns and manages a gas station in Jacksonville, Fla., discusses how the war is reaching him at home.
24 mins
27 March Finished
The Airport Meltdown
For the past week, travelers flying across the United States have waited in security lines that snaked through airports and parking lots as Transportation Security Administration officers called out of work because of a partial government shutdown. Karoun Demirjian, a breaking news reporter for the The New York Times, explains what has led to the extraordinary delays, and Michael Gold, a congressional correspondent for The Times, discusses the negotiations in Congress to bring an end to the crisis.
28 mins
26 March Finished
Are Higher Energy Prices Here to Stay?
Targeting oil and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf threatens to hurt businesses and customers around the world for months or even years.
24 mins
25 March Finished
How China Made Itself Tariff-Proof
About a year into President Trump’s global trade war, China hasn’t just survived. It has emerged stronger than ever on the world stage. Keith Bradsher, the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, discusses the domination of China’s robot-powered superfactories and how the country essentially made itself tariff-proof.
31 mins
24 March Finished
The Republican Identity Crisis Over the Iran War
The war in Iran has created strong divisions among President Trump’s supporters. An anti-interventionist wing of the Republican coalition and some senior administration officials partial to Mr. Trump’s criticism of long overseas conflicts have quickly become uneasy about the war, which has shown no immediate signs of ending. Robert Draper, a domestic politics journalist for The New York Times based in Washington, discusses Mr. Trump’s justification for the war and whether he is explicitly violating a pact he made with his base not to start another.
29 mins
23 March Finished
