Opinion Today: How to stop a merger
Here’s what we’re focusing on.
Opinion Today
May 7, 2026
An illustration of Hollywood figures suspended between two water towers.
Félix Decombat

Notable

Hollywood is afraid to say it, but this merger must be stopped. “It is straightforward: Convince state attorneys general to do what President Trump’s antitrust enforcers likely will not, and block the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. on antitrust grounds.”

— Mark Ruffalo, an actor, and Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project

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True believers blow Trump’s mind. “Transactional people often soothe their own consciences with the belief that everyone else is ultimately transactional as well — the only question is their price.”

— David French, an Opinion columnist

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Trump keeps saying he wants to leave NATO. Maybe he already has. “There is a path — incremental, cooperative — to responsibility sharing in the interests of both sides; to a relationship that is newly balanced, pragmatic and unsentimental. There is also a path to chaos and hostility, and a relationship that is damaged beyond repair.”

— Claudia Major, a senior vice president at the German Marshall Fund

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Spotlight

A baby’s mobile with small wooden toys hanging from it.
Em Wall for The New York Times

Is This the Hidden Reason So Few People Are Having Kids?

“What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood.”

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ICYMI

Give us the aliens. “If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist

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In Your Words

Re: “Neil deGrasse Tyson: Give Us the Aliens

What a welcome article in today’s news cycle. I believe that they came, they saw, they left. We have always been too primitive for intelligent life. — A comment posted by Maureen from The Desert

Read more comments on the story here and check out our Letters to the Editor.

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