Dear People of 2021: What Can We Learn From Hindsight?
The New York Times
For the first series from the Headway initiative, we followed up on forecasts from decades past to ask what the passage of time has revealed.
Our forebears had a lot of ideas about where we’d be by now.
Go back just a few years, and you’ll find no end of prophecies about the world we’d inhabit today — tech fantasies of roads filled with self-driving machines, dire visions of critical water sources gone dry, projections of cities and markets growing and shrinking. In The Times of even a decade ago, the year 2020 was considered a rich canvas for visions of the future, “far enough in the distance to dream, yet seemingly within arm’s reach.”
Imagining futures — to pursue, avoid, or merely prepare for — is how we often wrestle with change in the present. Yet our ability to envision — and therefore shape — the future is constantly pressed in by the world we inhabit today.
Hundreds of demonstrators marched downtown while a spokeswoman for President Trump said the president had the authority to detain Mahmoud Khalil.
The former congresswoman is the most prominent candidate so far to start a campaign in the 2026 contest. But the race could be upended if former Vice President Kamala Harris decides to run.
With few signs of progress on a proposed redevelopment project, one group is hoping to move the famous arena.
The administration’s warning came just after it pulled hundreds of millions of dollars from Columbia University.
Instead of speaking out on the hot-button debates of the day, more schools are making it a policy to stay silent as political pressure mounts against higher education.
In his second term, President Trump is cultivating warm relationships with G.O.P. lawmakers — and using the implicit threat of ruining them if they stray — to keep them in line behind his agenda.
Federal agencies are removing topsoil from burned areas but will not test it for contaminants. So scientists and residents are testing fire-affected properties themselves.
President Trump is planning to gut the work force while trying to turn the I.R.S. into a more political agency.
Three mayoral candidates have been accused of sexual misconduct. They deny wrongdoing. Will it be a deciding issue for Democratic voters?
President Trump has made clear he wants to keep both men and their allies within his movement, but the tensions are growing.
The authorities said there were no initial reports of damage from the quake, which struck in the hills west of Malibu.
The state and the correctional officers’ union agreed that officers should return to work Monday and that some provisions of a solitary confinement law would be put on pause.
One of the three media witnesses to the execution of Brad Sigmon in South Carolina on Friday describes what he saw.