Good morning. A 10-day cease-fire has started in Lebanon, and thousands of families are trying to head home. Let’s see if it holds. The deal is between Israel and Lebanon, and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia there, hasn’t said whether it would fully accept the truce. There’s more news below — and an excellent recipe for chickpeas al limone. But I’m going to start today in Washington, D.C., where President Trump wants to build a huge arch.
Stand tallA federal panel approved early designs for Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch yesterday. The decision was hardly a surprise: The committee members were all appointed by Trump. It doesn’t make the structure inevitable — a group of Vietnam veterans has already filed a lawsuit against it, and Congress might get involved — but the vote started a process that could dramatically change the skyline of the nation’s capital. The arch, and its height, are meant to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. The Commission of Fine Arts didn’t rubber-stamp the plan. One member suggested that it lose some lions (which are not native to the United States), the golden eagles on the viewing deck and a winged angel on top. There’ll be another vote down the line. But the tone was largely laudatory. Before the vote, the panel’s chairman called the president’s idea “beautiful.” On the table in front of him, there was a black baseball hat reading “Make Design Great Again.” A critic’s view
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who presented the plan, said it “embodies American freedom, American unity, American strength and the American dream.” I asked Michael Kimmelman, our architecture critic, about that. He was blunt: If it really involves a human architect it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to someone purposefully trying to simulate A.I. slop. It’s an insult to veterans, blocking views of Arlington National Cemetery. It is what you come up with if you’re designing a monument to excess and narcissism. Michael’s not a modernist snob. There’s nothing the matter with reviving the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art, he told me. But “size is not the same thing as scale. Classical architecture isn’t a bunch of acanthus leaves and columns on a building.” It’s about proportion and judgment. “The expression of those principles is what conveys dignity and strength, not size and glitter,” he said. He’s not alone. There’s been a lot of pushback on the design, including from the architecture critic who proposed it, The Times reported. And before yesterday’s vote, the panel received nearly 1,000 messages from the public. “One hundred percent of the comments were against the project,” one commissioner said. Compare and contrast
One of the inspirations for the arch is the Arc de Triomphe, the neoclassical monument in Paris that Napoleon commissioned in 1806. Trump has said the goal was “to top it by, I think, a lot.” In fact, as my colleagues report, Trump’s arch would be bigger than nearly every other monumental arch across the globe. Look at the comparisons here. Michael remembered another ambitious triumphal arch, also meant to outdo the Arc de Triomphe: the one that Adolf Hitler planned to raise in Berlin. It would have been more than 300 feet tall, covered with the names of the nearly two million Germans who died in World War I. In 1941, construction began. The massive concrete cylinder at the monument’s base was so heavy that it sank into Berlin’s soft, sandy soil, and the project had to be abandoned unfinished. “The idea for the arch collapsed under the weight of its own megalomania,” Michael said.
Israel-Lebanon
Strait of Hormuz
Since the start of the war between the U.S. and Iran, both countries have fought to control the flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. These charts show how effective each side has been.
More on Iran
Politics
Immigration
Other Big Stories
Not too long ago, a simple computer filled an entire room. Now we carry complex machines in our pockets. Is there any emerging technology that might make these huge data centers (and the cooling needed) obsolete — or much smaller? | Karen Bowen, Summerville, South Carolina Cade Metz, who covers artificial intelligence, writes: Not really. In fact, data centers are moving in the opposite direction, becoming even larger and more power-hungry. Companies like Google are developing new ways of cooling all this computing infrastructure with less water, but Moore’s Law — the notion that the number of transistors packed into each computer chip doubles roughly every two years, allowing computers to get smaller — does not apply in the age of artificial intelligence. A.I. is driven by a new kind of specialized chip that is needed in enormous numbers. That explains the size of these data centers. Have a look at this one from Amazon, which is only partly finished, if you want your mind blown.
The Ezra Klein Show explains why Jeff Bezos’ tax rate is lower than yours. Here’s a column by M. Gessen on a corporate war crimes prosecution in France. Human made. Human played. 75% off. Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.
Winery feud: She wanted to pry her family vineyard from her brothers. Instead, her lawyers paid the largest fine yet for passing off A.I. slop as sound legal reasoning. Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about dumb dogs. Rolling life: Roger Adams, who invented Heelys, died at 71.
$14,106— That’s the median annual cost for full-time infant child care in the U.S. If you live in a city or on a coast, where care is more expensive, the figure may seem low. But it’s still a lot. Why is child care so expensive?
Fraud allegations: A former player on the Alabama football team has been accused of wearing wigs and makeup and posing as N.F.L. players to collect nearly $20 million in fraudulent loans. N.B.A. playoffs: Oklahoma City is primed for a repeat, and the Knicks may fall short, John Hollinger writes. See more predictions. |
