Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

May 26, 2020

Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin and Hiroko Masuike

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Sean Rayford/Getty Images

1. States that reopened earlier — or never fully shut down — are among those showing signs of further spread of the coronavirus.

About a dozen states are reporting upticks in new virus cases, even as the national picture is staying steady or seeing improvement. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, above on Monday, and Tennessee are among the states that have seen increases in newly reported cases, several weeks after moving to reopen their economies.

The Washington, D.C., region, which has been locked down for weeks, also saw a jump in new cases as the city approached a planned reopening on Friday.

Meanwhile, some of the hardest-hit states, like New York and New Jersey, have reported steep downward trends. Oregon and Pennsylvania are also showing signs of progress. Here are five ways to monitor the outbreak.

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Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

2. A program to replace school meals with money to buy food has left millions of children waiting.

Congress approved the program, Pandemic-EBT, as part of the first major coronavirus relief package. By May 15, only about 4.4 million children out of the 30 million who potentially qualified had received the benefits. Above, Patrica Mulvihill of Jeffersonville, N.Y., received a donated meal for her family of four.

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The pandemic has laid bare the country’s deep inequalities. The Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones examined how one family’s income, already stretched to the limit, practically evaporated overnight.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

3. House Republican leaders plan to sue top congressional officials to block remote voting during the coronavirus pandemic, calling it unconstitutional.

In a lawsuit against Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House clerk and sergeant-at-arms, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, above, and 19 other Republicans said the plan would be the end of Congress as it was envisioned by the nation’s founders.

It’s part of a broader push by Republicans, led by President Trump, to portray Democratic efforts to find alternative voting methods during the pandemic as fraudulent attempts to gain political advantage.

Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

4. Senior military officials are planning to brief President Trump on options for pulling all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, including a timeline for withdrawing forces before the presidential election.

That might be Mr. Trump’s preferred option, but officials said they planned to push for a slower withdrawal schedule. A quick departure from Afghanistan, they worry, would effectively doom the peace deal that was hammered out this year with the Taliban.

At a pivotal moment in the nearly 19-year war, our reporters delved into the insurgents’ strategy through dozens of interviews, including a rare one with the chief of staff to the Taliban’s supreme leader.

5. A clash between a white woman and a black man touched off a heated discussion about the history of black people being falsely reported to the police.

Christian Cooper, an avid birder, said he had asked Amy Cooper, above, to leash her dog in Central Park. She refused. Ms. Cooper is then recorded on video calling 911 and saying, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.”

The video has been viewed nearly 30 million times. Ms. Cooper apologized but denied being racist. She has since been fired from her job and has surrendered her dog to an adoption group.

Separately, the Minneapolis mayor said four responding police officers had been fired following the death of a black man who was handcuffed and pinned to the ground by an officer. The man is repeatedly heard saying “I can’t breathe” in a bystander video.

Roger Kisby for The New York Times

6. Vegas without the pool parties, nightclubs and all-you-can-eat buffets.

When casinos and resorts open up — tentatively in early June — after weeks of being shutdown, the Las Vegas Strip will feel a lot different. At El Cortez Hotel & Casino, players will no longer be able to touch the cards, and about 100 slot machines have been removed. Many wonder if a stripped-down version of Las Vegas will still attract the visitors who powered the city.

The reopening of Broadway faces similar hurdles. A new poll found that theatergoers worry that the people around them will show up without masks or ignore social distancing rules.

And the N.H.L. announced plans to return to the ice no sooner than July 1, with a 24-team playoff format that will take place in two hub cities.

Andy Matias for The New York Times

7. We miss restaurants, and they miss you.

We reached out to a dozen chefs and proprietors for stories about their restaurants and signature dishes. Each provided a great recipe so that you could recreate some of the food from the steakhouses, oyster bars, taquerias and bakeries in your own kitchen.

Our restaurant critic Pete Wells hasn’t eaten out in more than two months. He has a small file of memories he plays, like the bar at I Sodi in New York, above, when he can’t stand the sight of his own kitchen. “Any restaurant recipe now is a postcard from another time,” he writes.

SpaceX/EPA, via Shutterstock

8. NASA and SpaceX are preparing the first U.S. space launch of a human crew in nearly a decade.

It will also be the first time that a private company and not a government space agency will be in charge of sending two NASA astronauts to orbit, on their way to the International Space Station. Here’s what you need to know about the launch on Wednesday.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft launch is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. Eastern time, and we’ll have live updates during the day.

Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times

9. “Nanette” was supposed to be Hannah Gadsby’s swan song. It turns out she had more to say.

Ms. Gadsby, the comedian whose one-woman show about the interrelationship of comedy and trauma went viral, is back with a new Netflix special, “Douglas,” which adds the subject of her autism diagnosis to the combustible mix.

“It was going to be unhealthy for me not to put something different out,” Ms. Gadsby told The Times Magazine. “I decided the best thing to do is what I know. And that is to create a show.”

Our critic said “the result is an intricate, heady show whose cleverness gets in its own way.” Here’s his review.

Theickabog.com, via Reuters

10. And finally, “once upon a time, there was a tiny country called Cornucopia.”

So starts “The Ickabog,” a new fairy tale from J.K. Rowling. The author of the Harry Potter series is releasing the story for free online in 34 daily installments until July 10. While details of the plot were scant, it won’t have anything to do with her original young wizard. Read the first two chapters here.

Ms. Rowling said she had started working on the book more than a decade ago, and decided to publish it now so children could have it “during these strange, unsettling times.” And reader participation is encouraged: The best submissions from an illustration competition will end up in the book’s final edition when it is published in the fall.

Have a magical night.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

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