“We all lived in Brooklyn,” Neil Sedaka said of Carole King (whom he dated) Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow. “It was a wonderful time. It must have been something in the egg cream. We used to hang out in the sweet shop and have egg creams and potato knishes.” (New York Times, 03.01.26)
“This city [Caracas] has the wages of Zimbabwe, the public services of Bangladesh and the prices of New York,” said Phil Gunson, a British political analyst who has lived there for decades. (New York Times, 03.01.26)
"What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time, when the fever breaks and things will revert to normal," writes Ian Buruma, whose Dutch father was deported to Nazi Germany as a slave laborer. "But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst." (New York Times, 03.01.26)
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“The Mideast won’t be the same again,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a London-based research group. “For 47 years the Mideast has been living with a hostile regime and a destabilizing force that it has tried to first isolate and then manage.” (New York Times, 03.02.26)
"One of the things about Elon Musk that I admire that doesn’t get talked about that much is Elon Musk is an industrialist Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs said. "He had plant and equipment when most of these guys who made fortunes in a gigantic way — the Google guys, they could do it in a basement and get bigger and bigger and take in tons of revenue with a relatively minor capital investment. This guy had to build factories and supply chains. Who else has done that? Edison couldn’t do that." (New York Times, 03.02.26)
“Negotiating with the Americans is almost meaningless,” Fyodor Lukyanov, one of Russia’s best-known foreign policy commentators, wrote on Telegram. “It’s really either about surrender or an invitation to prepare for a military solution.” (New York Times, 03.02.26)
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“If you are the leader of an adversary nation, you should be pretty worried,” said Paul Kolbe, who served as the C.I.A.’s station chief in Moscow, about improved surveillance methods (including AI) that tracked the movements of Iran's leader prior to his assassination. “But if you are Putin or Xi, not so much, because of the stakes at play. The lesson that keeps getting taught is that if you don’t have nukes, you are far more vulnerable.” (New York Times, 03.04.26)
“I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” said U.S. President Donald L. Trump after supporting Israel's successful attempt to assassinate Iran's leader. “Right, that could happen? We don’t want that to happen. It would probably be the worst, you go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.” (New York Times, 03.04.26)
“The judge’s decision is clear: Donald Trump’s unlawful attempts to trample on the self-governance of his home state have failed spectacularly,” said New York governor Kathy Hochul. “Congestion pricing is legal, it works, and it is here to stay. The cameras are staying on.” (New York Times, 03.04.26)
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“Never has so much risk or such sweeping military action of so much consequence been undertaken with so little apparent planning or weighing of potential consequences, both intended and unintended,” said David Rothkopf, the author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. (New York Times, 03.06.26)
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“He no longer is able to strike fear in the way that he had hoped. That mantle has gone over to Trump,” said Bobo Lo, a Russia analyst and former Australian diplomat in Moscow.. “And so Putin looks, in a way, a little bit pathetic.” (New York Times, 03.07.26)
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"Many people believe what they see on TV and do not distinguish between dramatization and documented fact — and the impact is not abstract, actress Darryl Hannah said about her demeaning depiction in Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. "In a digital era, entertainment often becomes collective memory. Real names are not fictional tools. They belong to real lives." (New York Times, 03.09.26)
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“What we need is a middle-ground solution that acknowledges that some people [i.e. parents of school shooters] can contribute to other people’s wrongdoing in ways that might be blameworthy,” said Ben McJunkin, an associate professor of law at Arizona State University, “but that aren’t the same as having committed the crime themselves.” (New York Times, 03.10.26)
“It’s remarkable to me,” said James Talarico, who won the Democratic primary for governor in Texas, “that you have an entire political movement using Christianity to prioritize two issues that Jesus never talked about . . . And so,” he continued, “I’m not saying they’re not important — I actually think both of those issues are very important. But to focus on those two things instead of feeding the hungry and healing the sick and welcoming the stranger — three things we’re told to do ad nauseam in Scripture — to me, is just mind-blowing.” (New York Times, 03.10.26)
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“Let’s not kid ourselves: Reunification has gone wrong,” author Peter Schneider told a German newspaper in 2025. “The worst part is that the AfD emerged from it, and the other parties have no idea how to deal with this outcome.” (New York Times, 03.13.26)
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“In our time, it has become common for young reporters to give as their moral code, indeed as their reason for choosing the profession, that they aim to create a better world,” John F. Burns wrote in 2015 upon his retirement as chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times. “It is a handsome thing, but one that can foster a missionary complex — a hubris, even — that can favor a blindness to inconvenient facts to the advantage of others.” (New York Times, 03.14.26)
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“There’s always someone who thinks that if only we were crueler, if only we’d killed another million Vietnamese, then we would have won this war,” said Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war. “If you reduce war to the satisfied feeling you get when you kill the enemy, it makes it a lot simpler and more satisfying.” (New York Times, 03.15.26)
“[Jonathan Groff] has a real awareness of the people who’ve come before him," said Isaac Oliver, who wrote the speeches that the actor uses to introduce his portrayal of Bobby Darin. “He’s got a Ph.D. from the YouTube university of gay elders and icons.” (New York Times, 03.15.26)
"Opportunism is contagious, but so is courage," writes Daniel Kehlmann, German author of The Director, about the Academy Awards ceremony. "The question is not whether actors should become politicians but whether citizens who happen to be very visible will at a decisive moment refuse to play the role that every authoritarian leader assigns them: decorative proof that all is well." (New York Times, 03.15.26)
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“If the U.S. is firing off so much ordnance against Iran, then they can’t use it against the Chinese in, say, two years, and it’s not going to be available for the Europeans against Russia,” said Ed Arnold, a European security analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a research group in London. (New York Times, 03.16.26)
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“This issue is not simply about Epstein or one man,” said Adam Howard, an education professor at Colby College who has studied prestigious private schools. “It is that these elite institutions often operate in a culture of quiet sponsorship and leverage and social networks. Most of us in the U.S. have no way of accessing these kind of networks that have one function and one function only: to make and remake elites.” (New York Times, 03.17.26)
“Anything that is considered extreme weather is some combination of the overall climate changes and the fluctuations in weather we have anyway,” said Mark A. Cane, a senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. “When the two line up, you get an extreme.” (New York Times, 03.17.26)
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“Air power is the U.S. drug of choice — we love to believe that it can achieve big political effects and also big military effects, yet the historical record doesn’t support that,” said Caitlin Talmadge, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in Gulf security issues. (New York Times, 03.19.26)
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“The Iranians understand Israel and the United States want to destroy this material or take it out,” said George Perkovich, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of How to Assess Nuclear Threats in the 21st Century. “So presumably there are lots of decoy canisters, so when the Special Forces get down there, instead of 20 or so containers there are hundreds or thousands. They are going to do many things to bedevil anyone trying to get it.” (New York Times, 03.20.26)
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“The beauty of Ramadan is that we break fast not by asking the person next to us of their name or their faith,” said NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “But simply by asking if they are hungry.” (New York Times, 03.22.26)
“The classic line of everybody, including myself, up to this point, was always, ‘[the Strait of Hormuz is] too big to fail,’ it will never close,” said Neil Crosby, head of oil research at Sparta, an energy market analysis firm. “Western or allied naval powers will never allow this to happen.” (New York Times, 03.22.26)
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“I could bridge the gap between the people who created technology — the engineers, the bits-and-bytes people — and the people that use the technology,” Paul Brainerd, the developer of PageMaker, the first desktop publishing software said in 2009. “I was always bridging back and forth between those two groups.” (New York Times, 03.23.26)
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“Part of [Banksy's] art, I realized, was getting out of trouble,” said Ivy Brown, the gallerist who had asked the daring artist to deface a meatpacking district billboard for Marc Jacobs clothing that showed a young man’s face with the tagline, “Boys Love Marc Jacobs.” (New York Times, 03.25.26)
“Heroes are elevated, and then the everyday people, the background player, or even the women who are the backbone of the movement, aren’t always talked about,” said Miguel Sandoval, a high school teacher in Los Angeles “There’s something there for ethnic studies and history teachers to think about, which is: How do we move away from the sort of purification of individuals?” (New York Times, 03.25.26)
“What we are seeing from all sides — the United States, Iran and Israel — is a race to the bottom in which threats against civilian infrastructure are becoming normalized,” said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “This kind of rhetoric doesn’t just escalate tensions irresponsibly, it signals a dangerous willingness to erode the very rules designed to protect civilians in war.” (New York Times, 03.25.26)
“I don’t believe in the [Equal Rights Amendment] at all,” actress Valerie Perrine told the Los Angeles Times in 1980. “Women aren’t equal, they’re superior.” (New York Times, 03.25.26)
“It feels way too much of a risk and hassle to leave the U.S. right now,” said Alice Graham, a 46-year-old Boston woman who recently cancelled upcoming flight reservations to Europe and Japan. “Planes are dodging missiles in the sky and we started a war, which makes us a huge target.” (New York Times, 03.25.26)
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"It’s not a geopolitical calculation that’s going to drive what Iran does eventually. It will be what’s in their hearts," said retired General Stanley McChrystal. (New York Times, 03.27.26)
“I thought of myself as a hunter-gatherer,” said David A. Ross whose jobs as director of major art museums in New York and San Francisco required him to raise funds from the global elite, including Jeffrey Epstein. “Some donors were great, wonderful people who became friends — people who cared deeply about art. Some were horrible assholes with just unbelievably troglodyte points of view, and I was the karma wash.” (New York Times, 03.27.26)
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“These large-scale protest events make people feel like they’re not alone — it’s like collective therapy,” said Dana R. Fisher, a professor at American University who studies civic engagement. " . . . what we really need to do is the work of defending democracy in our communities,” she added. “It’s not about inflatable costumes. It’s not about clever signs.” (New York Times, 03.29.26)
“Iran won’t fall with missiles and drones,” said Rebaz Sharifi, a commander of forces under the Kurdistan Freedom Party, an insurgent group that has been trying to topple the theocracy for more than four decades. “Iran needs a force to enter its territory, give hope to the people, and support them in overthrowing the regime at this time. That force should be the Kurds.” (New York Times, 03.29.26)
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“In our age of uncertainty, and in our age of great anxiety, is a thirst and hunger for God and stability that faith brings to people’s lives,” said Archbishop Mitchell Thomas Rozanski of St. Louis where the number of new Catholic converts is higher than in any year since 2016. (New York Times, 03.30.26)
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“We can all fondly remember the 99-cent shrimp cocktail and a dollar a gallon for gas,” said Derek Stevens, who owns several casinos in downtown Las Vegas, “but the reality is that’s in the past and it’s not coming back.” (New York Times, 03.31.26)
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