Monday Morning: Rush to judgement

And what else you need to know today.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story August 31, 2020 By David Leonhardt Good morning. Trump and Biden respond to the chaos in Portland, Ore. U.S. virus cases top six million. And some people are jumping to premature conclusions about the presidential race. The rush to polling judgment A polling station in Louisville, Ky., in June.Erik Branch for The New York Times Four years ago, Donald Trump rallied from a summer deficit in the polls to win the presidency. In the wake of this year’s Republican convention and the continuing chaos in some cities, many people — both his supporters and detractors — seem obsessed with the notion that he will do so again. And he may. Trump could certainly win re-election, especially because he would not need to win the national popular vote to do so. But there also seems to be a rush to declare that he has emerged from his convention in a much stronger position than he was before it. As G. Elliott Morris, who writes about polling for The Economist, tweeted over the weekend, “I see that people desperately want a post-RNC bounce news cycle.” As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote, “There is a lot of ‘the pendulum is swinging away from Biden’ speculation based on rather little actual evidence.” The pioneering psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman came up with an idea decades ago that explains the rush to declare a Trump surge: availability. The idea of availability is that people assess the likelihood of an event occurring based on how easy it is to imagine. And that often leads to errors. Since Trump won a comeback victory in the most recent presidential election, it’s very easy to imagine him doing so again. The possibility is highly available to our brains. In truth, the evidence of a recent Trump bounce is somewhere between mixed and weak. In two polls — by Morning Consult and Yahoo News/YouGov — Joe Biden’s lead over Trump has shrunk modestly (to six percentage points, in both). But an ABC News-Ipsos poll found no change, and a poll by the University of Southern California showed that Biden’s lead had grown slightly. In FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Biden leads by 8.2 percentage points. I often rely on Nate Cohn — who writes about polling and helps design Times polls — to help make sense of confusing times, and here’s his advice: 1. Trump has a serious chance to win re-election. (Most people seem to be doing a good job of remembering this.) 2. Post-convention polling bounces usually fade. So for a post-convention bounce to be good for Trump, it would probably need to show that he was doing better than trailing Biden by six points. 3. Polling is often messy immediately after the conventions, and you’d be wise to wait until after Labor Day to come to any conclusions about whether the campaign had changed. Last night, Nate tweeted: “I think people sense that the issue environment has changed in a way that *could* benefit Trump: crime/unrest is more salient; COVID less salient. I think that’s plausible. Whether it’s true, consequential, or lasting is all speculation.” THREE MORE BIG STORIES 1. A weekend of protests in Portland Emergency workers attend to a person who was shot during the protests in Portland, Ore., on Saturday night.Mason Trinca for The New York Times Details remained murky about the killing of a man in Portland, Ore., this weekend. The Times has put together a Q. and A. about what we know and don’t know. A pro-Trump, pro-police caravan traveled through the city on Saturday, clashing with counterprotesters at times. People shot paintball guns from trucks in the caravan, and protesters threw objects at them. The man who died, from a gunshot wound to the chest, has not been identified; he was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a local far-right group. The responses: “Do you seriously wonder, Mr. President, why this is the first time in decades that America has seen this level of violence?” Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, said on Sunday. “It’s you who have created the hate and the division.” Trump responded on Twitter, calling Wheeler “weak and pathetic.” The president also praised the caravan’s members as “great patriots” and accused the protesters — without any evidence — of trying to stage a “coup attempt.” Biden said Sunday: “I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same.” 2. New Trump-Russia details Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, curtailed the F.B.I.’s investigation into President Trump’s personal and financial relationship with Russia, The Times’s Michael Schmidt reports in a forthcoming book. Rosenstein limited the investigation, even though some career officials thought Trump’s Russia ties posed a national security threat. And Rosenstein instructed Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, to conduct an inquiry into election interference, but not into the president’s affinity for Russia. 3. The plan to send more plastic to Africa A recycling station in Nairobi, Kenya.Khadija M. Farah for The New York Times The U.S. fossil fuel industry faces an existential crisis as the planet grows warmer and renewable energy becomes more common. In response, oil companies have spent billions to pivot to producing plastics, which are made from the same chemicals. But who wants all that plastic? Documents obtained by The Times show that the industry is hoping to send much of it to Kenya — and to weaken the country’s environmental laws in the process. Test your knowledge: Our Climate team has put together a quiz on the most effective ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Here’s what else is happening Opposition supporters at a rally in Minsk, Belarus, on Sunday.Associated Press Large-scale protests against President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, the country’s longtime authoritarian leader, entered their fourth week. “People have gotten tired of everything and stopped being afraid,” one demonstrator said. The U.S. has passed six million confirmed coronavirus cases. (Here’s a map with the latest figures nationwide.) In New York, the absence of widely available rapid virus tests has led affluent New Yorkers to turn to services that can yield results in as little as 24 hours. Free standard tests can take days to return results. The Times’s Rukmini Callimachi has reported the largely untold story of what happened the night police killed Breonna Taylor in a botched drug raid. In his latest media column, The Times’s Ben Smith examines the long shadow of a 1996 magazine story on race by the prominent journalist Andrew Sullivan. Lives Lived: Larry Pardey and his wife, Lin, twice circumnavigated the world on wooden boats he had built over their more than 30 years of adventurous life at sea. Pardey died last month at 80. If you enjoy The Morning, please consider subscribing to The Times. Subscriber support helps make work like this possible. Subscribe Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT IDEA OF THE DAY: SPEAKERS VS. VOTERS With the Democratic and Republican National Conventions now over, it’s possible to compare the full lineup of speakers from both. And there are a couple of striking patterns. At both conventions, the parties offered a roster of speakers that was more diverse — with a greater share of speakers of color — than their voters are. About 48 percent of Democratic speakers were Asian, Black, Hispanic or Native American, compared with 41 percent of Democratic voters, according to an analysis by Ian Prasad Philbrick of The Times. By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center, 2019 But the gap was even larger at the Republican convention: By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center, 2019 Why? The R.N.C. “marked an extraordinary effort to recast President Trump’s image on issues of race and gender,” as The Times’s Adam Nagourney and Sydney Ember have written. PLAY, WATCH, EAT, REMEMBER Time enough to pickle Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times There is still a week until Labor Day — enough time to make pickles, an excellent accompaniment to grilled main dishes, for the long weekend’s festivities. Almost any seasonal vegetable can be preserved in a brine of vinegar and salt. It’s easy, and you’ll impress your friends with your newfound cottage-core skills. Add pickled green beans to a summer salad. Serve pikliz, a hot Haitian side dish, with roasted pork or burgers. Or for an unexpected dessert, preserve peaches with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and vanilla beans. The philharmonic hits the road For the next eight weekends, a Ford F-250 decorated in red, white and black will shuttle musicians from the New York Philharmonic to three unannounced locations in New York City for impromptu performances. The Philharmonic is calling the pop-up concert series NY Phil Bandwagon. “This is the thing, to groove off each other,” one Philharmonic musician said of playing with her colleagues again. “It’s not the same when we’re at home doing things over the internet.” Remembering Chadwick Boseman Chadwick Boseman died on Friday after a yearslong battle with colon cancer.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times The death of the actor Chadwick Boseman at age 43 has prompted an outpouring of tributes from Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington and many others. “To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain — what a use of his years,” former President Barack Obama wrote. Boseman’s legacy will most likely be linked with his leading role in the movie “Black Panther.” To understand that film’s outsize influence on culture, revisit this essay on Afrofuturism by The Times’s Brent Staples. Or read this Time magazine article by Jamil Smith on the movie’s “revolutionary power.” And enjoy this “Tonight Show” montage of Boseman surprising fans after they reveal what the movie meant to them. Diversions The comedian Samantha Bee told The Times about 10 things that inspire her, from Margaret Atwood to videos of octopuses. Games Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Ocean liner? (four letters). You can find all of our puzzles here. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David P.S. After 81 years, The Times has retired daily television listings in the print newspaper. You can see today’s print front page here. Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about the experience of one Black police officer in Flint, Mich. On the latest Book Review podcast, Kurt Andersen discusses his new book about the political hijacking of America. Lalena Fisher, Carole Landry, Amelia Nierenberg, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. The Morning Briefing newsletter is now The Morning newsletter. You received this email because you signed up for the newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

Your Weekend Briefing

Presidential Race, Chadwick Boseman, September Books

View in browser|nytimes.com August 30, 2020 By Remy Tumin and Elijah Walker Welcome to the Weekend Briefing. We’re covering the state of the 2020 race, an extensive look at Breonna Taylor’s death and the impact of Chadwick Boseman. Doug Mills/The New York Times 1. General election season is officially in full swing. A weeklong Republican offensive against Joe Biden ended with President Trump’s formal acceptance of his party’s nomination. The national political conventions set the battle lines for the election’s remaining weeks: Mr. Biden is focusing on Mr. Trump’s virus management, while the president is sticking to a law-and-order message. Throughout the convention, Mr. Trump shattered the traditional boundaries between government and politics. Public housing tenants in New York City said they weren’t told their interviews with a government official would be used at the convention. But never before has a convention by a major party felt compelled to call such a diverse array of speakers to defend the character of a sitting president, our politics reporters write. Above, Mr. Trump in Londonderry, N.H., on Friday. Late last night, a man was fatally shot as a caravan of Mr. Trump’s supporters drove through Portland, Ore., for a pro-Trump rally and clashed with counterprotesters. The man who was killed was wearing a hat with a far-right insignia. Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times 2. A Trump administration program to cover uninsured virus patients has fallen short, a Times review found. President Trump said in April that the government would help the uninsured, but the quickly concocted plan has not lived up to its promise. Some patients like Luis Fernandez of Houston, above, are still receiving bills for tens of thousands of dollars. Others don’t qualify because conditions other than Covid-19 were their primary diagnosis. Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are concerned that the standard diagnostic test for the coronavirus may be too sensitive and too slow. Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive. Nearly six million people in the U.S. have been infected and at least 182,611 have died. Here’s the latest map and case count. Pete Kiehart for The New York Times 3. College campuses are pioneering technology that could help combat the coronavirus crisis. They are trying out wastewater tests in dormitory sewage, above at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, dozens of health-check apps and versions of homegrown contact-tracing technologies. And they are experimenting with testing methods that may yield faster results and be easier to administer, such as using saliva instead of nasal swabs. Without students, school bus fleets have been idle. Privately owned buses normally carry 10 million students to U.S. schools each year, and many of them are now on the brink of failure. And in Britain, millions of pupils are set to return to classrooms for the first time since March. The Tory government is confident that schools can reopen safely, but public trust is running low. Jon Cherry/Getty Images 4. This was supposed to be a year of big plans for Breonna Taylor. She had just bought a new car and wanted to buy her own home, and perhaps have a baby with her boyfriend. They had already picked out a name. And then the police came to her door in Louisville, Ky. Interviews, documents and jailhouse recordings help explain how she landed in the middle of a deadly drug raid. An ex-boyfriend’s run-ins with the law entangled her even as she tried to move on, leading to what her family’s lawyer called “catastrophic failures” by the police that ended in her killing. And in Wisconsin, days after a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, the authorities provided new details on what led up to the videotaped encounter that has prompted heated street protests and calls for reform. William Widmer for The New York Times 5. Days after Hurricane Laura cut a destructive path across Louisiana, hundreds of thousands of people remained without electricity. At least seven people have been killed by carbon monoxide from generators. The situation is especially dire in Lake Charles, above, a city near the coastline where many residents are without power and running water. President Trump visited there Saturday afternoon. Laura’s destruction could have been much worse, but Hurricane Rita, a 2005 storm, forced changes to building codes and attitudes that might have saved lives. And in the West, wildfires continue to burn from California to Minnesota, leaving millions of people to cough and wheeze through the toxic air. Sporadic power outages and the relentless heat have made life indoors almost equally intolerable. Belapan/via Reuters 6. Middle-class Belarusians long tolerated the eccentricities of the country’s ruler, Aleksandr Lukashenko. That changed this month. Mr. Lukashenko wears the moniker of “Europe’s last dictator,” building a system that stifled personal freedoms and political opposition. And it was a system that many could live with: Stay out of politics, and you can live very well by Eastern European standards. But Belarusians hit their breaking point. The coronavirus crisis set the stage, followed by a blatantly falsified presidential election. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have rallied against Mr. Lukashenko, despite the threat of arrest. Marvel Studios, via Associated Press 7. It’s nearly impossible to make dignity interesting. Chadwick Boseman found a way. That’s Wesley Morris’s assessment of the actor, who died on Friday from a yearslong battle with colon cancer. He was 43. “In playing dignity,” Morris writes, Mr. Boseman “often seemed tasked to perform its burden,” adding, “But there was always more to him in these parts than heft.” Mr. Boseman portrayed pathbreaking Black Americans onscreen, including Jackie Robinson, James Brown and Thurgood Marshall. But it was his role as King T’Challa in “Black Panther,” above, that represented a moment of hope, pride and empowerment for Black moviegoers around the world. Here’s his full obituary. Explaining how he humanized those heroes, he told The Times last year: “You’re a strong Black man in a world that conflicts with that strength, that really doesn’t want you to be great. So what makes you the one who’s going to stand tall?” Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times 8. “It was feminine, it was sexy, it was strong, and I was hooked.” Princess Lockerooo, above in pink, is one of a few dedicated New Yorkers who have preserved the art of waacking, a 1970s club dance. Just as “Soul Train” brought the dance into living rooms across the country, Instagram and TikTok have turned the retro technique of rapid but contained gestures into a social media sensation. Has your TikTok feed been overwhelmed with Santa Claus lately? Within the past month, an entire network of Christmas-focused accounts has popped up, fueled by videos of holiday cheer. 9. September, the publishing industry’s biggest month, does not disappoint this year. There’s new fiction from Elena Ferrante, Yaa Gyasi and Marilynne Robinson, a tell-all from Mariah Carey and several deep dives into Cold War espionage, among others. Here are 15 titles our editors are looking forward to. Books that were bumped from spring and early summer because of the pandemic are now colliding with long-planned fall releases, making this one of the most crowded fall publishing seasons ever. There’s just one problem: Publishers have to figure out how to print all of those books. D'Angelo Lovell Williams for The New York Times 10. And finally, our Best Weekend Reads. A new wave of Black activists, above in Minneapolis, the story behind a fire photo that evoked 2020, how hedge funds are profiting off the pain of malls and more great stories top this week’s roundup. For more ideas on what to read, watch and listen to, may we suggest these 11 new books our editors liked, our music critics’ latest playlist and a glance at the latest small-screen recommendations from Watching. And a note for our print subscribers: The Times will no longer include the TV listings in its print edition after 81 years. Test your knowledge of this week’s headlines with our news quiz. And here’s the front page of our Sunday paper, the Sunday Review from Opinion and our crossword puzzles. We’re in the homestretch of summer. Have a leisurely week. Your Weekend Briefing is published Sundays at 6 a.m. Eastern. Did a friend forward you the briefing? You can sign up here. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com. Browse our full range of Times newsletters here. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. The Morning Briefing newsletter is now The Morning newsletter. You received this email because you signed up for the newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018