Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Tuesday.
Smithsonian leader is resigning after clashes with TrumpAfter a seven-year run, Lonnie Bunch announced today that he was stepping down as secretary of the Smithsonian. He had spent much of this year and last under pressure from the White House to promote what President Trump calls “patriotic” history at the institution’s high-profile museums. Bunch, 73, told my colleagues today that he was not leaving because of the president’s criticisms. However, he acknowledged that the role had become a strain. “At a certain point,” he said, “I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.” Trump has attacked the Smithsonian as an “out of control” institution where “everything discussed is how horrible our Country is.” A White House report this summer accused the American History museum of engaging in “extreme political activism.” (See what officials took issue with.) Bunch attempted to be diplomatic, but not dismissive of the White House. Admirers praised him for quietly holding the line; some critics said he had showed too much deference to Trump. Now on his way out, Bunch described the Smithsonian’s role as one of exploring history in all of its complexity: “I will stand against wind and tide to prevent history from being erased, softened and made palatable,” Bunch said. “That’s wrong.” In other Trump administration news:
Israeli allies ban trade with West Bank settlementsBritain’s government announced new sanctions today on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, accusing settlers there of committing “ethnic cleansing.” The Canadian and French governments also joined the British in promising to ban trade in settlement goods. The symbolic moves, by three once-staunch allies, demonstrate Israel’s deepening isolation. In recent weeks, international attention, long focused on the deadly war in Gaza, has turned to the West Bank, where Israeli extremist settlers have repeatedly attacked Palestinians as the military has stood by. The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, criticized the British sanctions. But over the weekend the American ambassador to Israel described Israelis who had attacked Palestinians in the West Bank as “terrorists.” A growing number of prominent Israelis, including former generals and prime ministers, have also denounced the settler attacks. My colleague Azam Ahmed, who has reported on the opposition in Israel, spoke with our newsletter The World.
OpenAI says it solved one of math’s ‘Millennium Problems’OpenAI said today that its newest artificial intelligence tool had solved one of the most closely watched unanswered questions in mathematics, in just 88 hours. The problem, called Navier-Stokes, involves a series of equations often used to predict the weather. Humans have been working to solve it for decades. (Here’s an explanation of the Navier-Stokes problem.) For more:
China takes an Arctic shortcutThis week, a Chinese cargo ship is finishing a three-week journey from China to Britain. It is the start of the first regular cargo service to use the Northern Sea Route. As you can see in the chart above, the route is shorter than the typical path through the Suez Canal. But even with melting Arctic ice, the northern route is still much more difficult, dangerous and expensive. Analysts said it could be an effort by China to flex its geopolitical muscle. More top news
In an era of heavy rain, a transit system with 47,000 openings is bound to leak. So our reporter set out to learn what it would take to floodproof New York’s subways.
These images influenced the way we dressFashion photography is sometimes looked down upon in art circles because it usually exists to sell you something. But beyond leaving an indelible mark on what we wear, many fashion photographs have proposed fresh ideas about identity and beauty and offered viewers portals to a new world. So my colleagues at T Magazine gathered a group of experts — two photographers, a fashion designer, a supermodel and others — to come up with a list of the 25 most influential fashion photographs. See the images they chose. Related: Here’s how Naomi Osaka became the fashion queen of tennis.
Your to-be-read list is about to get longerPublishers often save their heaviest hitters for autumn. And whether you like it or not, fall is right around the corner. So, my colleagues at the Book Review put together lists of the highly anticipated titles arriving over the next few months. The nonfiction list includes a memoir from Sylvester Stallone, a stranger-than-fiction Cold War thriller and a biography of Cormac McCarthy. The fiction list includes dystopias by Emily St. John Mandel and Hernan Diaz and a new novel by Barbara Kingsolver. (We made both lists free for all Evening readers.)
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