Vaccine advisers to the CDC meet today to decide on COVID boosters and childhood shots, with new members raising doubts about long-settled science. The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates by a quarter point to shore up a slowing job market, even as President Trump pushes for deeper cuts. And ABC suspends Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after his remarks about Charlie Kirk’s killing.
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Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Scott Hensley, Rafael Nam, Matteen Mokalla, Mohamad El-Bardicy and Olivia Hampton.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ana Perez and Christopher Thomas.
We get engineering support from Zo van Ginhoven. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
For weeks, fights have been escalating between top scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., culminating in his accusation that the agency’s top official, Dr. Susan Monarez, was untrustworthy.
Dr. Monarez went before a Senate committee on Wednesday to give her side of the story.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who covers health policy for The New York Times, discusses the testimony and the rift that the hearing exposed within the Republican Party over how far to go to support Mr. Kennedy and his vaccine agenda.
Guest: Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a correspondent based in Washington who covers health policy for The 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: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
The Federal Reserve announces the first in what could be a series of interest rate cuts. Former CDC Director Susan Monarez tells Congress that RFK Jr. had her fired because she wasn’t willing to sign off on vaccine policy changes sight-unseen. And Israel’s military moves in on Gaza, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians leave town.
Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has paused a £200m investment in Britain and could move its primary listing to America. Can the UK maintain its status as a “life-science superpower”? Why autonomous air wings are the future of war in the sky. And how scientists in the Caribbean are restoring the barrier reef through “coral IVF”.
The year 1900 was a pivotal year in world history. It was the end of the 19th century and on the cusp of the 20th century.
Many of the technical advances that would come to define the next 100 years were just being unleashed.
Social and economic changes were unfolding that would revolutionize the world. The changes that the world had seen in the 19th century were only a taste of what would come over the next century.
Learn more about the world in the year 1900 and how the world had changed over the last 50 years on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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In the first episode of While We're At It, Cameron Sexton joins in to talk about his work as a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives and Speaker of the state House.
Today on Talk Python: What really happens when your data work outgrows your laptop. Matthew Rocklin, creator of Dask and cofounder of Coiled, and Nat Tabris a staff software engineer at Coiled join me to unpack the messy truth of cloud-scale Python. During the episode we actually spin up a 1,000 core cluster from a notebook, twice! We also discuss picking between pandas and Polars, when GPUs help, and how to avoid surprise bills. Real lessons, real tradeoffs, shared by people who have built this stuff. Stick around.
Today’s international system is made up of states: Territorial entities with defined borders, with exclusive control within those borders, diplomatic recognition by other states outside of them and usually (though not always) tied to some idea of the “nation.”
But how many states have existed throughout history, such as during the nineteenth century? Some early counts put the number at just a few dozen–a measure that international relations professors Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths thought was far too low, missing polities throughout the non-Western world. Together, they put together their own count of independent states in the nineteenth century, as published in their latest workBefore Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia UP, 2025).
Charles joins us today to talk about his work. He is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the legacies of historical states and state systems, democratization, and civil resistance.
