Authorities in Utah are still searching for a motive in the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Jerusalem after Israel’s strike on Doha put the U.S. at odds with two close allies. And at the Emmys, Adolescence, The Studio, and The Pitt took top prizes.
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Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Russell Lewis, Kevin Drew, Matteen Mokalla, Mohamad ElBardicy, and Olivia Hampton
It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas.
We get engineering support from David Greenburg. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
The Supreme Court has cleared the way for President Trump to remake American government, siding with the president again and again. But many of those rulings have lacked something fundamental: an explanation for why the most important judges in the country came to their decision.
Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The Times, explains the justices’ increased use of the so-called shadow docket, and why it has sown confusion — and in some cases frustration — in courts around the country.
Guest: Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments, for The New York Times.
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
Photo: Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
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Sources describe how a Utah man went from a bright student to the prime suspect in an assassination investigation. Memphis prepares for a potential deployment of National Guard troops on its streets. And as schools grapple with artificial intelligence in the classroom, one program is using A.I. to compress schoolwork into just two hours a day.
Lyse Doucet tells the history of Afghanistan in recent decades through the story of the Inter-Continental hotel, which opened in the capital in 1969. The BBC’s international correspondent stayed there frequently from the late 1980s, and she details how the Soviet occupation, civil war, US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban have all left their mark on 'The Finest Hotel in Kabul', and the people who worked there.
There’s plenty of pink champagne and fine dining in Michela Wrong’s study of the rise and fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the charismatic dictator of Congo/ Zaire at the end of the 20th century. It’s 25 years since her biography, 'In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz', was published, and as the Democratic Republic of Congo appears to be on the brink of another civil war, she reflects on this latest cycle of violence.
There have been calls for international help in the DRC, but just how effective is military intervention in the long run? Ashleigh Percival-Borley served in Afghanistan in 2010 but had to watch from the sidelines as the US and UK abruptly pulled out a decade later, leaving a vacuum filled by the Taliban. Now, as a military historian and one of BBC Radio 4's researchers-in-residence, she’s interested in giving voice to women in war – not just as the victims, but as active participants.
The New Generation Thinkers scheme, which puts research on radio, is a partnership between BBC Radio 4 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
A young director with several films under his belt had an idea for a movie. His idea was to create a modern version of an old space adventure film like Flash Gordon.
He wrote a story that would cover several films, negotiated a groundbreaking contract, and in the process, completely changed the film industry.
Learn more about Star Wars and how this movie revolutionized movie-making and the movie industry on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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In the first episode of While We're At It, a brand new interview series with First Things editor Rusty Reno, Michael Knowles joins in to talk about “The Pope and the Führer: The Secret Vatican Files of World War II,” a new four-part docuseries now available on DailyWire+.
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.
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A judge lets Google keep paying Mozilla to make Google the default search engine but only if those deals aren’t exclusive.
More than 85% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google search payments.
The ruling forbids Google from making exclusive contracts for Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini, and forces data sharing and search syndication so rivals get a fighting chance.
Note that just saying you require 3.9+ doesn’t tell the user that you’ve actually tested stuff on 3.14. I like to keep Trove Classifiers around for this reason.
Also, License classifier is deprecated, and if you include it, it shows up in two places, in Meta, and in the Classifiers section. Probably good to only have one place. So I’m going to be removing it from classifiers for my projects.
One problem, classifier text has to be an exact match to something in the classifier list, so we usually recommend copy/pasting from that list.
But no longer! Just use troml!
It just fills it in for you (if you run troml suggest --fix). How totally awesome is that!
I tried it on pytest-check, and it was mostly right. It suggested me adding 3.15, which I haven’t tested yet, so I’m not ready to add that just yet. :)
pqrs is a command line tool for inspecting Parquet files
This is a replacement for the parquet-tools utility written in Rust
Built using the Rust implementation of Parquet and Arrow
pqrs roughly means "parquet-tools in rust"
Why Parquet?
Size
A 200 MB CSV will usually shrink to somewhere between about 20-100 MB as Parquet depending on the data and compression. Loading a Parquet file is typically several times faster than parsing CSV, often 2x-10x faster for a full-file load and much faster when you only read some columns.
Speed
Full-file load into pandas: Parquet with pyarrow/fastparquet is usually 2x–10x faster than reading CSV with pandas because CSV parsing is CPU intensive (text tokenizing, dtype inference).
Example: if read_csv is 10 seconds, read_parquet might be ~1–5 seconds depending on CPU and codec.
Column subset: Parquet is much faster if you only need some columns — often 5x–50x faster because it reads only those column chunks.
Predicate pushdown & row groups: When using dataset APIs (pyarrow.dataset) you can push filters to skip row groups, reducing I/O dramatically for selective queries.
Memory usage: Parquet avoids temporary string buffers and repeated parsing, so peak memory and temporary allocations are often lower.
Brian #4: Testing for Python 3.14
Python 3.14 is just around the corner, with a final release scheduled for October.
When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his bleak and barbarous new surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans, Ovid thought the outer reaches of his world was where civilization ceased to exist. Our own fascination with the Greek and Roman world has for centuries followed this perspective, shrouding cultures at the far reaches of their influence in myth. But what was it like to live on the edges of these empires, on the boundaries of the known world? In The Far Edges of the Known World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025) ancient historian Owen Rees draws on archaeological excavations to reveal these so-called borders as thriving multicultural spaces. This is where the boundaries of “civilized” and “barbarian” began to dissipate; where traditional rules didn’t always apply; where different cultures intermarried; and where nomadic tribes built their own cities. Transporting readers through historical spheres of influence, Rees journeys from the sandy caravan routes of Morocco to the freezing winters of the northern Black Sea, from the Red River valley of Vietnam to the rain-lashed forts south of Hadrian’s Wall. Beyond well-remembered figures like Cleopatra and Caesar, Rees introduces us to the everyday people who called the borderlands home. We meet an enterprising sex worker in Egypt’s Naucratis, gambling soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall in England, a Greco-Buddhist monk hailing from the Ganges, and more. As Rees shows, exchanges of trends, ideas, even religious practices were happening all over the world.
