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February 14, 2026 
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Good morning. On Valentine’s Day, consider the ways in which we’re sticking to established paths — and the places where we yearn to deviate.
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| María Jesús Contreras |
Open road
After a blizzard in New York City, a pedestrian accustomed to crossing the street mid-block may find herself barricaded in, banks of plowed snow creating a fortress, forcing her to walk the length of the shoveled sidewalk to the crosswalk, as the urban planners intended. Follow the grid, same as everyone else, no shortcuts.
That is, unless someone has, mercifully, carved an incursion into the snow bank, creating a makeshift means of egress, a way out. These unofficial trails that permit deviation from the prescribed route are known as “desire paths.” Desire paths (or, sometimes, “desire lines”) show up after snowstorms, as my colleagues Anna Kodé and Amir Hamja documented this week, but you can find them anywhere humans have decided the official trail is too indirect: Those dirt trails that branch off paved walkways in parks, offering a shorter route from A to B, are desire paths, too. Has there ever been a more romantic name for a traffic pattern? (Maybe there has? In 1978, William Least Heat-Moon published “Blue Highways,” an account of traveling U.S. back roads — they used to be blue on old highway maps — in his van after the loss of his job and the breakup of his marriage. A heartbreaking title, but desire path still wins, I think.)
The word desire has an ache in it. That’s why its application to a trail deviating from a snowy sidewalk is so affecting — it’s not just that I’d prefer to walk some other way, but I have a deep longing for another way. Imagine the planning commission meeting in which bureaucrats discuss desire paths in between more mundane-sounding plans for rezoning the waterfront and building a bus stop. Desire is so tender, so intimate, so individual.
The metaphor feels too easy: chart your own course, color outside the lines, take the road less traveled (or, rather, create your own road). But when you add the word desire to the equation, the process of deviating from the established route feels more urgent. Desire paths are not just ways to get from one place to another. They’re evidence, over time, that an existing design is not adequate. They “indicate yearning,” a traffic engineer told The Times in 2003. There’s something gorgeous about the collective yearning signified by an alternate path through the snow or the lawn — a silent project in which people, over time, express a common desire. When I see a desire path right where I feel the urge to deviate from the official route, I feel connected to the pedestrians who had the same idea, whose desires mirrored my own.
It’s Valentine’s Day, a holiday that’s more closely associated with heart-shaped everything and dinner reservations than it is sincere expressions of emotion. If you’re feeling hemmed in by some established script for the day, why not consider your own desire path? What trail would you prefer to tread? How would you alter the terrain in your own life on an occasion that, while nominally devoted to honoring romance, can feel architected by forces that decided there’s one rose-strewn path we should all be following?
“Desire lines are inherently subversive,” my colleague Anna writes. “They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us.” On the map of a life, as on the map of a city, desire lines scar the landscape, those alternate routes we took when we were impelled by yearning to strike out in a different direction. “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,” Heat-Moon wrote in “Blue Highways” of his thinking on the eve of his 13,000-mile road trip. As the snow melts in the city and the physical desire paths go with it, I’m considering the simmering desire, mine and others’, to make new, metaphorical paths, to cut lines through drifts that are walling us in, to create new ways out when the old ones no longer suffice.
Immigration
- The Department of Homeland Security has run out of funding as Congress feuds over changes to ICE. But officials say the department’s essential functions will continue.
- Homeland Security has sent tech companies hundreds of subpoenas for names and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize ICE.
- Two ICE agents were placed on leave after video evidence contradicted their story of shooting an immigrant.
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In the Courts
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| Harvard University. Sophie Park for The New York Times |
Other Big Stories
Film and TV
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| Jacob Elordi in “Wuthering Heights.” Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated Press |
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| The New York Times |
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| Gabriel Basso in “The Night Agent.” Christopher Saunders/Netflix |
