Good morning. Today, we're covering the anniversary of a beloved video game — as well as Trump's appointments, Ukraine and young Gazans on TikTok.
Slaying dragons for 20 yearsYou might not have played World of Warcraft, but you probably know of it. The game, which turns 20 this year, inspired an Emmy-winning "South Park" episode and a (not-so-great) movie. Its fans include celebrities like Henry Cavill and Mila Kunis. WoW, as the game is known, was social media before social media. As a teenager, I would log on as my undead mage character mostly to hang out with my friends. What we did together was certainly different than how people use today's social media; I do not typically hunt giant dragons on Facebook or Instagram. But it was a chance to socialize with the people I had met in the game. It was also, as a 16-year-old, the only space I felt safe being openly gay. The game was truly huge. When it was released 20 years ago, so many people tried to play that the servers struggled for weeks to handle the demand. At its peak, WoW had more than 12 million monthly subscribers worldwide, making it one of the biggest games of its time. More than 100 million people have played it at one point or another. Perhaps most impressively, the game is still going. It got a new expansion, called The War Within, this year. Imagine everything that has changed in the world since 2004, when phones were still dumb and the biggest movie of the year was "Shrek 2." WoW has endured all of that. My colleagues wrote about World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary in this lovely story that published today. We've included excerpts from their reporting below. I recommend reading the whole piece, which has many more interesting stories that we couldn't fit in the newsletter. A welcoming space for women
Women have embraced World of Warcraft since its early days. In 2009, a Nielsen survey found that it was the most popular core title among female gamers between the ages of 25 and 54. Many games structured around player-versus-player conflicts stoke negativity in the form of trash talk. World of Warcraft is not immune to bad behavior, but rather than fighting one another, players generally work together to defeat computer-controlled enemies. Groups of like-minded players form guilds to collaborate on dungeons or role-playing. "People opt into that," said Holly Longdale, the executive producer for World of Warcraft. "You don't have to partake. That's what creates these opportunities for safety and comfort." A case study in virologyIn 2005, a harmful effect called Corrupted Blood spread throughout the game's world, angering players but intriguing epidemiologists. Corrupted Blood, which damaged players for several seconds before infecting others nearby, escalated because of a programming error that mistakenly extended the effect. In theory, players should have died before carrying the infection too widely. But it spread as players used portals to travel to other regions and was further amplified by pets and non-playable characters. Years before the real-world Covid pandemic, the World of Warcraft community attempted self-isolation and quarantines. But those efforts were not enough. Blizzard, the company behind the game, had to reset the servers entirely. An Emmy-winning spoof
The irreverent animated comedy series "South Park" satirized the game in the 2006 episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft," in which Cartman and company aim to take down a vindictive and highly ranked player. The episode, which won an Emmy, explored the addictive quality of the game and was a meditation on media fixation before the distractions of smartphones and social media. A place to love and to grieveJoining your World of Warcraft guild regularly after work or school can build relationships that extend far beyond the digital world of Azeroth. A striking example is chronicled in "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin," a documentary that was released on Netflix in October. Mats Steen, who had a degenerative muscle disease, spent most of his time inside, and his parents believed he had few friends. But when Steen died at the age of 25, his parents were shocked by the outpouring of support from his World of Warcraft guild. Several of the people he had spent his life with online traveled to his funeral in Norway.
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Can Trump carry out his goals without an experienced cabinet? No. Trump's cabinet picks show that this term will be as chaotic as his first. "One of the greatest concerns about Trump's second term was that he would be more competent this time around. But we can already see that there is no learning curve," The Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes. Yes. You don't need experience to lead government agencies if you don't want those agencies to work. "Neither chaos nor dysfunction nor incompetence is an obstacle to Trump's lawless intentions. If anything, they're assets," Times Opinion's Jamelle Bouie writes.
Democrats win when they're economically populist and culturally conservative, Adam Jentleson writes. At the high school where Naomi Beinart is a junior, the girls were in despair after Election Day, while the boys were indifferent. The disconnection between genders had never felt starker, she writes. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the end of the post-Cold War era and Maureen Dowd on Elon Musk's presence in Trump World.
Meme: Old photos of Gavin Newsom, California's governor, are spreading online. Most popular last week: Microplastics are everywhere. Here's how to avoid eating them. "Party Politics": Our critic dives deep into a short poem about the anxiety of an empty glass. Vows: At first they hid their love, then a reality show gave them courage. Lives Lived: Thomas Kurtz invented BASIC, a simplified computer programming language that allowed students to operate early computers and eventually propelled generations into the world of personal computing. He died at 96.
"Orbital," by Samantha Harvey: On Tuesday, Harvey's fifth novel won the Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction written in English. Clocking in at a fleet 207 pages in paperback, this gorgeous book follows a day in the life of six astronauts circling Earth on a space station at 17,500 miles per hour. Only, in this weightless world — where humans have no use for legs and forks are secured to tables with magnets — each day consists of 16 sunrises and sunsets, 16 days and 16 nights. The astronauts observe, experiment, eat, mourn, celebrate and wrestle with their own places in the universe, and Harvey takes readers along for the ride. Her plot is as scarce as oxygen in space but, as our reviewer wrote, "Sometimes, wonder and beauty suffice." More on books
This week's subject for The Interview is Dr. Ellen Wiebe, one of Canada's leading advocates for medical assistance in dying (MAID). This summer, my mother, who had A.L.S. and was living in Toronto, died via MAID. In the time since, I realized I had lingering questions about the practice. I was hoping Wiebe could answer them. In Ontario, one of the steps in the [MAID] process is that you have two independent assessments from a doctor or a nurse practitioner who helps determine whether a patient is eligible. I was at one of those assessments. I'm sitting in a room listening to a conversation between my mom and a doctor who has never met my mom before and is trying to assess her material, physical and psychological situation. Why would this doctor think she can understand the fullness of this situation based on a one-hour call? First of all, the clinician who assessed your mother reviewed her medical history, and it was extensive, I'm sure. Secondly, our job during those assessments is to make sure that the person understands their condition. Remember, some of the A.L.S. patients we assess can't talk. But your mother was still verbal, right? Yeah. So being able to understand that she understood her condition, that she understood her options — that probably wasn't very difficult. That is the main thing that we are assessing: Do they understand this decision? MAID applicants have to be of sound mind. My mom was physically suffering but also depressed. Depression, as I understand it, is a mood disorder. How can we say with certainty that someone experiencing a disordered mood or state of mind is making a rational choice? When people are clinically depressed, they tend to believe that they are bad people, that it's their fault that things are going wrong. That is disordered thinking that might respond to therapy. But if a person like your mother says, I'm losing everything, what's the point in going on just to get worse — that's pretty logical. Read more of the interview here.
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Make popcorn at home. Pick the best Dutch oven, a kitchen workhorse. Use a better spatula.
In this week's Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein suggests making coconut curry chickpeas with pumpkin and lime, a pantry recipe that calls for canned chickpeas and coconut milk. Emily also highlights a new recipe from Hetty Lui McKinnon: sweet and sour cauliflower, a vegetarian version of the beloved Chinese American restaurant staple.
Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangram was autonomy. Can you put eight historical events — including Napoleon's coronation, the writing of "The Canterbury Tales," and the debut of lava lamps — in chronological order? Take this week's Flashback quiz. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.
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