“It’s been decades since a meaningful team-sport rivalry played out at the Winter Olympics, the kind of showdown that pits two nations in a symbolic clash of worldviews,” Adam Sternbergh writes. Thursday’s women’s hockey final between the U.S. and Canada is bringing back this “elbows up” energy.

MAHA is “rived by inherent contradictions and ideological rivalries, and is held together less by a shared positive vision of reform than by still-burning rage about the pandemic emergency,” David Wallace-Wells writes.

“Criminals and government officials are barely hiding their schemes, and their brazenness is meant to make us feel helpless, to think that nothing can be done,” Brendan Ballou writes. “That is false.”

New York “is facing a slow-motion degradation of a critical urban asset unless the mayor abandons his rent freeze and persuades the state to let landlords more easily recoup investment costs,” Nicole Gelinas writes.

“Ideally, McMahon would be trying to fix some of these pivotal issues affecting our nation’s children, instead of touring the country asking students, ‘How many original colonies were there?’” Jessica Grose writes of the secretary of education, Linda McMahon.

“The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill,” Paul Ford writes. But how is A.I. changing that? “Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?”

The Trump administration’s efforts to remove immigration protections for many Haitians has been put on pause. “The relief that many Haitians here feel is tempered by an omnipresent dread,” our columnist Michelle Goldberg writes from Springfield, Ohio.

Texas’ “shifting demographics keep the blue team dreaming of clawing back ground, especially in years when it feels a political tailwind blowing. Like this one,” Michelle Cottle writes.

“For the larger MAGA right, as it was for the slaveholder radicals, the Declaration of Independence and its powerful vision of human equality stands as one of the chief obstacles to its effort to consummate its vision of domination,” our columnist Jamelle Bouie writes.

“Every day and night, in the neighborhoods most affected by ICE raids, volunteers stand on street corners and patrol the blocks, phones and whistles ready,” Will McGrath writes from Minneapolis. “We are legion, the local moms and dads, we cruise the city in our minivans. You can’t shoot us all.”

“Israel’s far-right government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is spitting in America’s face and telling us it’s raining,” our columnist Thomas Friedman writes.

“The world is changing, for real, and the primary driver of that change is Donald Trump,” Massimo Calabresi writes from Munich.

Anti-Western civilization rhetoric from many universities represent a “pedagogy in civilizational self-loathing — some of it justified and overdue, much of it distorted by factual fudging and decontextualized historical judgments,” our columnist Bret Stephens writes.

“The American right often identifies powerfully with Europe, but the Europe it wants to love is not the Europe that’s been built over the past few generations,” our columnist Ross Douthat writes, “so American conservatives are trying to alter the beloved as the price of their affection.”

“In 1984, the Democratic Party ceded the playing field to the Republican far right when it shut out Jesse Jackson’s message of economic and social justice and peace with our neighbors in favor of its neoliberal agenda,” Sheila D. Collins writes in a letter to The Times.

“Quite simply, Jesse Jackson led one of the most consequential American lives,” Michael Eric Dyson writes. “He was a genuine populist who stood in stark contrast to the ersatz populists of today.”

"We need nothing less than a new educational operating system — one that channels public funding through students and families directly, rather than through centralized district bureaucracies," Jorge Elorza writes.

Times Opinion assembled 13 Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters to ask how the party is handling the moment, what changes and reprioritizations they want to see, and what kinds of Democrats are standing out. Here's what they said.

“It is difficult to estimate the White House’s off-the-books revenue,” write Aziz Huq and Vanessa Williamson. But by any measure, Trump “is raking in billions of dollars, bypassing Congress and the law.”

“Trump appears determined to prevent his party from achieving a durable majority coalition anchored by a multiracial working-class base,” Thomas Edsall writes.

“Since 2016, price gouging has become an even more pressing issue,” writes the law professor Tim Wu.

“Being honest about our A.I. use, in my experience, strengthens trust between doctors and patients and will hopefully lead to better care,” Dr. Adam Rodman writes.

“This is a presidency that is, by any measure, failing,” our columnist Ezra Klein writes.

“We need to take a hard look at what kinds of homes we consider the fulfillment of the American dream,” Gillian Morris writes.

“The members of the Federalist Society took the risk that Democratic legal thinkers have so far avoided,” Jeffrey Toobin writes. “The Federalists gave a platform for their clear agenda and absorbed the criticism that came with it.”

“I’m always on the lookout for art that tries to make sense of our careening, crises-ridden political moment, and found the play invigorating,” our columnist Michelle Goldberg writes. But over the last two weeks, “it’s started to seem almost prophetic.”

“The world is entering a dangerous new nuclear age,” writes the editorial board. “President Trump’s approach to this new, unbound era is alarming in both its words and its mechanics.”

“Trump, his aides and many of his supporters haven’t purged contempt from our politics. They’ve mainstreamed it. Purified it. Industrialized it. It’s their push-a-button pushback against everyone who challenges them,” argues Frank Bruni.

“It is well documented that strongmen are at their most dangerous when they feel threatened,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes. “Americans should brace for heightened militarized domestic repression and more imperialist aggression abroad.”

“Just as some walk so that others may run, some danced on skis without falling (or clubbing nearby spectators with their poles) so that others may today land not only double cork 1260s, but also modeling gigs,” writes Bruce Handy.

“Even if we do not like what is happening in America today, hearing of the many occupations of a single family may have allowed our grandchildren to feel more understanding of turmoil, and of difference,” writes Roger Rosenblatt.

“For those who can, it’s an incredible privilege to be able to feed a baby from your body,” Samantha Slater writes in a letter to The Times. “More than how we feed our babies, we should be focusing on the societal systems that make partnership equality more challenging.”

“A so-called Christian Zionist would also likely be a Christian Kurdist,” writes our columnist David French, “or have a Christian commitment to Palestinian statehood. Kurds and Palestinians have also been historically oppressed, denied a home and deprived of the right to defend themselves.”

“Epstein’s network may not have known everything, but many of them knew enough,” our columnist Ezra Klein writes. “Whether they believed his denials or didn’t care about the crimes, there was a solidarity, or at least a transactionalism, that protected Epstein and enabled his abuses.”

“Tyrants can be overthrown. Repairing the damage they cause may be democracy’s more enduring challenge,” write Zahid Hussain and Tom Felix Joehnk.

What does the United States’ new immigration enforcement infrastructure look like? This week on “The Ezra Klein Show,” Caitlin Dickerson, a journalist at The Atlantic, talks about the ways immigration policy has changed under the second Trump administration.

“Mass childhood pickiness is a modern phenomenon created largely by junk food companies that marketed products like sugary cereals as food specifically for children, convincing Americans that kids need different, easily likable foods,” writes Helen Zoe Veit.

“This war no longer feels like an interruption; it’s just reality,” Nataliya Gumenyuk writes. “Ukraine’s military may be exhausted, but it’s also the most battle-hardened in Europe.”

“As long as the efficiencies offered by A.I. are mediated by human workers, there will be false starts and misadaptations and blind alleys that make pre-emptive layoffs reckless or unwise,” our columnist Ross Douthat writes.

The Trump administration is “using detention to inflict pain on anyone — immigrant or citizen — caught in its grasp,” our columnist Jamelle Bouie writes.

“The debate was whether A.I. would jump to the dark side once it got smarter than us,” our columnist Maureen Dowd writes. “But since then, even the tech gods who once had good intentions have gone to the dark side, seduced by the billions to be made.”

There is so much fretting about trust in news these days. Maybe there shouldn’t be. My latest, on how Bezos won my misplaced trust the same way the media often did: by telling me what I wanted to hear. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/o...

“Humane, medically supervised treatment is not coercion,” Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist, writes in a letter to The Times. “Being left to freeze, starve and unravel on the streets is not freedom.”

“The heart may connect us to our loved ones, but it will also, in time, separate us from them,” Darcey Steinke writes.

“Americans should not accept vague excuses for protecting the identities of Mr. Epstein’s associates,” the editorial board writes. “A two-tiered justice system that coddles the powerful and revictimizes the vulnerable is a violation of American values.”

With its latest layoffs, The Washington Post is “attempting to shrink its way into relevance — not with its audience but with its unfathomably wealthy, highly distracted owner,” our columnist Lydia Polgreen writes.

“Integrity now is a liability in Republican politics for one very clear reason. And that is, it means you have some guardrail,” our columnist David French says on this episode of “The Opinions.”

“‘Wuthering Heights’ is a story in which love is an all-encompassing obsession that destroys anything in its path. It is also a story about how love, sustained through generations, eventually redeems that destruction,” B.D. McClay writes.

“MAGA-style leaders may say that our country can’t handle taking in so many migrants, that this is a suicidal move — the desperate act of a collapsing country,” writes Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain. “But don’t let them fool you. Spain is booming.”

Rather than rallying resistance to artificial intelligence, “academic administrators are aiding and abetting a hostile takeover of higher education,” writes Matthew Connelly, a vice dean for A.I. initiatives at Columbia University.