The Daily

Sidney Poitier, who was Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and who helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, died last week. He was 94. For Wesley Morris, a Times culture critic, it is Mr. Poitier — not John Wayne, Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe — who is the greatest American movie star. “His legacy is so much wider and deeper than the art itself,” Wesley said. “This man has managed to affect what we see, how we relate to people, who we think we are, who we should aspire to be...

As the highly infectious Omicron variant surged, a high-stakes battle played out between Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and the city’s teachers’ union about how to keep schools open and safe. We chart this battle on the ground in Chicago, speaking with teachers, parents and students about the standoff.

The diplomatic talks in Geneva this week are of a kind not seen in a long time: an effort to defuse the possibility of a major war in Europe. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has amassed military equipment and personnel on the border with Ukraine. President Biden has warned that there will be consequences if Mr. Putin decides to invade, but what can Washington do to impel the Kremlin to back down?

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has a reputation for causing mild illness, yet it’s fueling a staggering rise in hospitalizations across the country. In some of the early hot spots for the variant, emergency rooms are filling up, hospitals are being flooded with new patients and there aren’t enough staff to care for all of them...

This year’s Golden Globes ceremony was muted. Instead of a celebrity-filled evening, broadcast on NBC, the results were live tweeted from a room in the Beverly Hilton. It was the culmination of years of controversy for the awards and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization behind them. Who are the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and how did one of the biggest awards shows get to this point?

In her new book, “The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change,” Pauline Boss considers what it means to reach “emotional closure” in a state of unnamable grief. Hard to define, these grievances have been granted a new name: ambiguous loss. The death of a loved one, missing relatives, giving a child up for adoption, a lost friend — Boss teases out how one can mourn something that cannot always be described. The pandemic has been rife with “ambiguous loss,” Boss argues...

After the election on Nov. 3, 2020, President J. Donald Trump and his allies tested the limits of the U.S. election system, launching pressure and legal campaigns in competitive states to have votes overturned — all the while exposing the system’s precariousness. Although the efforts weren’t successful, they appear to have been only the beginning of a wider attack on American elections. In the final part of our Jan...

This episode contains strong language. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming was the only Republican leader calling on President Donald Trump to move on from his efforts to overturn the results. Then, after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, she gave a full-throated condemnation of what had happened and the rhetoric that facilitated it...

Who exactly joined the mob that, almost a year ago, on Jan. 6, breached the walls of the U.S. Capitol in a bid to halt the certification of President Biden’s election victory? Members of far-right extremist groups were present but so too were also doctors, lawyers, substitute teachers and church deacons, many of whom had previously been nonpolitical. The question of why they were at the Capitol that day is hard to answer, but some of the most useful clues come from three F.B.I...

For more information on today's episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. About a decade ago, companies began offering pregnant women tests that promised to detect rare genetic disorders in their fetuses. The tests initially looked for Down syndrome and worked well, but later tests for rarer conditions did not. An investigation has found that the grave predictions made by those newer tests are usually incorrect. We look at why the tests are so wrong and what can be done about it.