The Morning: Israel’s response to Iran

Plus, a trip to the movies and a World Series thriller.

View in browser|nytimes.com October 26, 2024 Good morning. Today, we've got an update on the fighting in the Middle East — followed by Melissa Kirsch's regular Saturday newsletter. —David Leonhardt Overlooking Tehran. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times Israel's response First, we want to update you on the latest from the Middle East. The Israeli military struck Iran overnight, in response to the barrage of missiles that Iran had fired at Israel this month. Israel's attack seemed limited, and Iranian officials appeared to downplay the impact. The combination made it unclear whether the fighting between the two countries would expand — or whether Iran would choose not to respond. The White House expressed support for Israel, describing the attack as proportionate, and said it should be the end of military exchanges. Israel said it had targeted air defense systems and long-range missile production sites in Iran, as well as sites in Syria and Iraq. Two Iranian soldiers were killed, according to Iran's military. By midmorning, life in Tehran looked normal, people in the city said. Children were in school, and adults had gone to work. We have much more coverage on our website. Here's how the attack unfolded. And we recommend this analysis by Patrick Kingsley, our Jerusalem bureau chief. Now over to Melissa Kirsch for our normal Saturday newsletter. María Jesús Contreras Screen time By Melissa Kirsch It's the season when many festival darlings, the films that critics saw and loved in Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto, finally arrive in theaters, and this year, it feels different. More exciting? More like the old days? I've been making a concerted effort to actually go and see movies in the movie theater instead of waiting for them to arrive on streaming platforms, and it's been paying off gloriously. The movies I've seen recently — "Didi," "Megalopolis," "Anora," "Saturday Night" — have felt urgent and exciting: complicated stories with complicated characters, not a superhero franchise among them. I didn't love all of these movies equally, but I loved seeing them, loved being in the dark drinking up their writers' and directors' idiosyncratic visions. And I loved the intention that led to the experience: I made a decision to see a movie, went to an establishment expressly built for that purpose, sat and paid attention for the length of the film and then, only then, returned to nonmovie life. Contrast that experience with the half-attention I so often pay a movie on a streaming platform, watching it in installments over several nights, maybe on an iPad, maybe while I'm brushing my teeth. Each movie I saw in the theater, I talked about afterward, with the friends accompanying me, with colleagues the next day. Some of the movies I've streamed — some abandoned before completion — I've discussed with no one. As the Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in his wonderful essay "Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies?": "Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don't appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation." I'm willing to wager that no filmmaker ever made a movie hoping or expecting that it would end up beyond the reach of conversation. Not every movie you watch has to be a means of connecting with other people, but it could be. Walking out of "Anora" the other night, chatting with friends, comparing the film with the director's previous ones, I realized how rare the experience of seeing a movie with a group had become for me. Once, it was commonplace, a weekly tradition. Every Sunday evening when I was 14 and 15, my friends Justin and Tracy and I would go with one of our moms (we couldn't yet drive ourselves) to the SoNo Cinema, an art-house theater in South Norwalk, Conn., where we saw films that would never be shown in our suburb's mainstream theaters. We saw Hugh Grant in Ken Russell's horror movie "The Lair of the White Worm." We saw "Babette's Feast," the first Danish film to win an Oscar for best foreign language film, and Pedro Almodóvar's "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." After, we'd go out to dinner and discuss what we'd just watched. Searching for information about the theater, I found stories about its struggles to stay open over the years, its various fund-raising efforts. "I'm convinced that a lot of the young people we used to draw are raising families now and watching video rental films at home," the owner told The Times in 1987, the same year we went to SoNo to see the British film "White Mischief," about the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya. It closed not long after. I've over-romanticized those early adventures in theatergoing (I'm not the only one — "the movie house equivalent of 'The Secret Garden,'" Tracy called it when I asked her recently). But the truth is, my friends and I still discuss the movies we saw at SoNo, how they informed our ideas of what life after high school might be like. And while I'm not going to argue that we're as impressionable in middle age as we were when we'd been alive for barely more than a decade, my recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV Paramount Pictures Looking for something spooky to watch this weekend? Filmmakers, actors and Times writers ranked the 25 best jump scares in cinema history. "Venom: The Last Dance," the last of the superhero trilogy, is one of seven movies our critics are talking about this week. "What We Do in the Shadows" returned for its sixth and final season. The show, about a household of vampires on Staten Island, is one of television's few great laugh-out-loud comedies, Margaret Lyons writes. On German TV, (a fictional) Angela Merkel is solving crimes. Music Phil Lesh, who anchored the Grateful Dead as its bassist and co-wrote some of its best-known songs, died at 84. Instrumentalists who take up contemporary music sometimes have to sing and play at the same time. It requires excellent aural and physical coordination. Jon Caramanica, a Times pop music critic, shared six social media accounts that changed how he discovers music. More Culture Sawa, a new restaurant in Park Slope, serves Levantine classics with a dash of hipster style. Read our review. The African American artist Barbara Chase-Riboud hadn't had a show in Paris, her adopted city, since 1974. Now she is being celebrated in eight museums. This fall, art exhibitions around the U.S. will showcase artists' responses to political and social movements. Here's a guide. THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election Kamala Harris and Beyoncé Erin Schaff/The New York Times Kamala Harris held a rally in Houston with Beyoncé, focused on abortion rights. "It's time for America to sing a new song," Beyoncé told the around 30,000 attendees, Harris's largest crowd so far. Chinese hackers targeted data from Donald Trump and JD Vance's phones in an effort to gather intelligence. It's unclear whether they took or saw any data. A former model accused Trump of groping her in front of Jeffrey Epstein in 1993. Two of her friends corroborated her account; the Trump campaign denied it. Trump, in a three-hour podcast interview with Joe Rogan, floated eliminating income taxes in favor of tariffs and repeated debunked election-fraud claims. Here are more takeaways. Trump again threatened Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted him. Trump called Smith "mentally deranged" and said "he should be thrown out of the country." The Washington Post's editorial page won't endorse a presidential candidate, ending decades of tradition. Jeff Bezos, the paper's billionaire owner, made the decision. Other Big Stories President Biden formally apologized for the U.S. government's policy of forcibly putting Native American children in boarding schools between the 1800s and the 1960s. "It's long overdue," he said at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. Antony Blinken, Biden's secretary of state, said U.S. and Israeli negotiators would soon return to Qatar to try to revive talks with Hamas, but a quick cease-fire deal seems unlikely. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed Florida's strict abortion ban, is working to defeat a November ballot measure that would legalize it until about 24 weeks of pregnancy The Times Sale starts now: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. CULTURE CALENDAR By Desiree Ibekwe 🎥 "A Real Pain" (Friday): In this Jesse Eisenberg-directed movie, two cousins — played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin — take a historical tour of Poland to connect with their recently deceased grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor. The film, The Times's Marc Tracy writes, is representative of the output of the grandchildren of survivors. "I'm telling the story of the third generation with all of its contradictions," Eisenberg said, "with its distance, its privileged remove, its grotesque fascination, as well as all the reverence that should be applied." (A Times critic called it "a knockout.") RECIPE OF THE WEEK David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Cyd Raftus McDowell. By Melissa Clark Butternut Squash and Goat Cheese Galette We're reaching peak winter squash season, which means now is the time to celebrate dishes that show off its velvety sweetness. Yossy Arefi's butternut squash and goat cheese galette does just that, showcasing thin wafers of orange-hued squash baked on top of the tangy, herby cheese. If you can time things to serve this while it's still a little warm, it will be at its flakiest and most tender. But it's still excellent a few hours later after cooling down. And feel free to use store-bought pie dough if homemade is just one step too many. This lovely tart will be a crowd-pleaser either way. REAL ESTATE Arsy Khodabandelou and Katie Muela with their dogs Hank and Odin. Katherine Marks for The New York Times The Hunt: A young couple with a budget of $800,000 was looking for a dog-friendly two-bedroom on the Upper East Side. Which home did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $380,000: A three-bedroom Gothic house in Cambridge, N.Y.; a renovated three-story home in Cincinnati; or a cottage in Portland, Ore. LIVING An Outerspace warehouse in Carlstadt, N.J. Graham Dickie/The New York Times Pack it up: A founder of a clothing company was frustrated by how warehouses handled his brand's stock. So he started a new kind of packaging firm for chic labels. Streaming: Our strange new way of witnessing natural disasters. Caregiving: Dementia can change a loved one's personality. Here are expert-recommended strategies that can help. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER The beauty of a to-do list app If you're prone to forgetting appointments or missing deadlines, or you often find yourself leaving the grocery store without the one thing you went for, you might benefit from an app that keeps track of your to-dos. Beyond just throwing all of your tasks onto a screen, a good to-do list app also helps you prioritize, while syncing to your calendar and staying flexible as your work changes. Wirecutter's experts found the three best to-do list apps, each of them thoughtfully designed and convenient to use. So you can jot your to-dos down, and get right back to the doing. — Kaitlin Mahar GAME OF THE WEEK Freddie Freeman celebrating his home run last night. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images New York Yankees vs. Los Angeles Dodgers, World Series: There's too much history between these two franchises to squeeze into a newsletter, so we'll just focus on the present. The Dodgers won a Game 1 for the ages last night, thanks to Freddie Freeman's walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning. (See the video.) It was a fitting start to this series, considering the hitting prowess of these two teams — both of whom led their respective leagues in home runs this season. Game 2 is tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on Fox NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangrams were captaincy and incapacity. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week's headlines. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa P.S. The most-clicked article in this week's newsletter was a story about a 14-year-old boy who died by suicide after developing a relationship with an A.I. chatbot. Read it here. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. 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