The Daily

The escapism of movies took on a new importance during pandemic isolation. Caity Weaver, the author of this week’s Sunday Read, says that to properly embrace this year’s cinematic achievements, the Academy Awards should not only hand out accolades to new releases, but also to the older films that sustained us through this period...

This episode contains strong language. This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened in the time since they first ran. When New York City was the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis in the U.S., Sheri Fink, a public health correspondent for The Times, was embedded at the Brooklyn Hospital Center. In April, she brought us the story of a single day in its intensive care unit, where a majority of patients were sick with the virus...

A few weeks ago, we put a callout on The Daily, asking people to send in their good news from a particularly bleak year. The response was overwhelming. Audio messages poured into our inboxes from around the world, with multiple emails arriving every minute...

It is a very human thing, at the end of a year, to stop and take stock. Part of that involves acknowledging that some remarkable people who were here in 2020 will be not joining us in 2021. Today, we take a moment to honor the lives of four of those people. And in marveling at the extraordinary and sometimes vividly ordinary facets of their time among us, we hold a mirror up to the complexities of our own lives...

The radio host Delilah has been on the air for more than 40 years. She takes calls from listeners across the United States, as they open up about their heavy hearts, their hopes and the important people in their lives. She tells callers that they’re loved, and then she plays them a song. “A love song needs a lyric that tells a story,” she says. “And touches your heart, either makes you laugh, or makes you cry or makes you swoon...

“If death practices reveal a culture’s values,” writes Maggie Jones, the author of today’s Sunday Read, “we choose convenience, outsourcing, an aversion to knowing or seeing too much.” Enter home-funeral guides, practitioners who believe families can benefit from tending to — and spending time with — the bodies of the deceased. On today’s Sunday Read, listen to Ms. Jones’s story about the home-funeral movement and the changing nature of America’s funeral practices...

For years there has been an evictions crisis in the United States. The pandemic has made it more acute. On today’s episode, our conversations with a single mother of two from Georgia over several months during the pandemic. After she lost her job in March, the bottom fell out of her finances and eviction papers started coming. The federal safety net only stretched so far...

This episode contains strong language. When the photo-sharing app Instagram started to grow in popularity in the 2010s, the chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had two options: build something comparable or buy it out. He opted for the latter. The subsequent $1 billion deal is central to a case being brought against Facebook by the federal government and 48 attorneys general. They want to see the social network broken up...

Undetected for months, sophisticated hackers working on behalf of a foreign government were able to breach computer networks across a number of U.S. government agencies. It’s believed to be the handiwork of Russian intelligence. And this is far from the first time.  Today, why and how such hacks keep happening and the delicate calculation that dictates how and if America retaliates. Guest: David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent for The New York Times...

North Dakota and New Orleans have been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus. On today’s episode, we speak to health care workers in both places as they become some of the first to receive and administer the vaccine, and tap into the mood of hope and excitement tempered by a bleak fact: The battle against Covid-19 is not yet over.  Guest: Jack Healy, a national correspondent for The New York Times...