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As the debate turned more tense, several Republicans, both for and against the new map, reported threats or swatting. Long-simmering ideological and stylistic divides among Republicans in Indiana spilled into the open, with many long-serving or institutionalist figures who opposed the map clashing with Trump-aligned conservatives who favored the plan. Republicans would have been expected to flip the only two Democratic-held congressional seats among the state’s nine districts if the new map had passed.

In the end, a slim majority of the Senate’s Republican caucus voted against the map.

That Indiana lawmakers voted at all showed the enduring power that Mr. Trump holds over his party. Many in the State Senate did not want to debate the map, which was proposed outside the usual once-a-decade redistricting cycle, and the chamber’s leadership relented and brought the bill to the floor only after the president and his allies stepped up their pressure campaign. The map’s defeat, though, showed the limits of Mr. Trump’s power to bend Republican officials to his will.

“I believe the bill on its face is unconstitutional,” said State Senator Greg Walker, a Republican who opposes redistricting and who recently reported a swatting incident at his home, a form of harassment in which law enforcement was called to respond to a nonexistent emergency.

Another Republican opposed to the new map, State Senator Spencer Deery, said that “I see no justification that outweighs the harms it would inflict upon the people’s faith in the integrity of our elections and our system of government.” He added that “it’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C.,” and that “it’s time to say no to outsiders who are trying to run our state.”

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Republicans make up a majority of the Indiana Senate, but more than a dozen voted against President Trump’s new political map, which aimed to add Republicans in Congress.CreditCredit…Jon Cherry for The New York Times

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The Leonid meteor shower is peaking this week, potentially bringing hundreds of long-tailed meteors with it. This annual fall display is an excellent opportunity to spot fireballs in the night sky.

Meteor showers are the beautiful result of Earth moving through the trail of debris streaming from comets and asteroids as they make their own way around the sun. As these chunks of space rock enter our atmosphere, they burn up as shooting stars. And if they land, they become meteorites.

The Leonids are an annual shower that occurs in early November and lasts through early December, when Earth passes through the stream of debris of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.

Perhaps the most famous Leonid display in modern memory took place on November 17, 1966, when meteors seemed to fall like rain, and some witnesses said it felt as if Earth was plunging through space.

These storms tend to follow a 33- to 34-year rhythm tied to the comet’s orbit. Most years are quieter, however, which is the most likely outcome this week. The last major event occurred in 2002.

How to Watch the Leonids

The Leonids will reach their peak at 1 P.M. EST on November 17. Hundreds of long-tailed meteors will cross the sky at 44 miles per second, giving sky watchers a good chance to catch the display closer to dawn on November 18.

When many meteors appear to streak from the same point in the night sky, that point is known as the radiant. This year, the shower’s radiant rises around midnight and climbs highest just before dawn, making the predawn hours the best time to watch.

Favorably for sky-gazers, the next new moon will arrive on November 20, which means there is only a thin waning crescent in the sky during the Leonids’ peak this week. Under dark sky conditions, observers might see as many as 10 to 15 Leonids per hour. Experts recommend using binoculars or telescopes and lying flat on your back with your feet toward the east. After about 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adjust, and you will begin to see meteors.

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US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure “an act of international piracy”.

Trump confirmed the operation on Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”

“It was seized for a very good reason,” the US president added, declining to say who owned the vessel.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, posted footage of the seizure on X. The grainy, unclassified 45-second video shows US forces landing on the tanker from a helicopter.

In an accompanying statement, Bondi said the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of Defense, had “executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.

She said the tanker had been sanctioned by the US for “multiple years” due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted its own video edit of the seizure, soundtracked with an excerpt from LL Cool J’s song Mama Said Knock You Out. DHS has repeatedly faced criticism for poaching music for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment ads. DHS recently used a Sabrina Carpenter song, without permission, prompting the pop star to respond that the video was “evil and disgusting”.

LL Cool J did not immediately address the use of his song.

Venezuela’s government said in the statement that the seizure “constitutes a blatant theft and an act of international piracy”.

It continued: “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed … It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

Earlier, speaking at a rally in Caracas, Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”.

Maduro has been in power since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death from cancer. Widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election, Maduro has clung to power after launching a wave of repression that forced Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the 2024 vote, into exile in Spain.

Since August, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.

On Tuesday, two US fighter jets circled the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes. The aircraft flew just north of Maracaibo, one of Venezuela’s most populous cities.

On Wednesday, González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado, was awarded the Nobel peace prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a peaceful and just transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the prize, telling a ceremony in Oslo that her mother’s struggle to end years of “obscene corruption” and “brutal dictatorship” would go on.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and, although years of mismanagement and corruption have done severe damage to its oil industry, oil exports remain Venezuela’s main source of revenue. The main customer is China.

The objective of this week’s reported tanker seizure was not immediately clear.

In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s former chief Latin America adviser, Juan González, said that at around the time of last year’s election he had pushed for the US to station two navy destroyers off Venezuela’s coast “and even impose an oil blockade”.

That never happened, but González believed one possible way out of the current crisis might be for the Trump administration to push Maduro into accepting a recall referendum, perhaps in 2027, but threatening “real hardline consequences” such as a blockade if the result was not respected.

“I think it is potentially a viable option where there should be a very credible and aggressive snapback associated with it,” González said, adding: “Imposing an oil blockade would shut down the entire economy.”

“It’s less aggressive [than a land strike] but it’s still considered an act of war,” added González, who was the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration.

“He [Trump] could take unilateral action by blocking oil tankers from leaving or entering the country, and that I think would precipitate Maduro’s departure.”

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Footage shows US forces taking control of oil tanker off Venezuelan coast – video

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Opinions on Donald Trump’s mental state vary widely; some critics label him as “insane” due to his behavior and rhetoric, while others argue he is simply a product of mediocrity and privilege. Ultimately, whether he is considered “crazy” is subjective and depends on individual perspectives.

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Ms. Machado, 58, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for leading a successful electoral challenge to Mr. Maduro last year. He disregarded the election results, declared himself the winner, and cracked down on dissent.

In an audio message published by the Nobel Peace Prize committee on Wednesday, Ms. Machado said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo to participate in the day’s festivities surrounding the awarding of the prize. But she arrived too late to attend the ceremony, at which her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the Nobel on her behalf.

Mr. Trump’s administration, which accuses Mr. Maduro of leading two drug cartels, has deployed the largest U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis, carrying out fatal strikes on boats that it says were trafficking drugs and, on Wednesday, seizing an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.

Yet the two leaders spoke by phone last month, and Venezuela recently began accepting U.S. deportation flights, raising the possibility that both sides could be edging toward a diplomatic settlement.

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María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, greeted supporters in the Norwegian capital, hours after missing the ceremony at which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.CreditCredit…Jonas Been Henriksen/NTB Scanpix, via Associated Press

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In 2018, at a Dubai resort next to the blue-green waters of the Persian Gulf, Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, stood before an audience of hundreds of petrochemical executives to set out his vision for the future of the world’s largest oil company. The goals he described weren’t primarily about energy. Instead, he announced plans to pour $100 billion into expanding production of plastic and other petrochemicals.

Nasser predicted that with a growing global population wielding more purchasing power every year, petrochemicals—compounds derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels and of which plastics and their ingredients constitute as much as 80 percent—would drive nearly half of oil-demand growth by mid-century. About 98 percent of virgin plastics are made from fossil fuels. In sectors that include packaging, cars, and construction, he said, “the tremendous growth in chemicals demand provides us with a fantastic window of opportunity.”

In the years since Nasser’s 2018 speech, Saudi Aramco, owned mainly by the government of Saudi Arabia, has acquired a majority stake in the country’s petrochemical conglomerate SABIC. Together, the companies have bought into huge Chinese plastic projects and built petrochemical plants from South Korea to the Texas coast. Aramco aims to turn more than a third of its crude into petrochemicals by the 2030s—a near tripling in 15 years.

Although the industry has framed its plans to pivot to plastic as a response to consumer demand for a material central to modern life, another factor is clearly at play: As the looming dangers of climate change are pushing the world away from fossil fuels, the industry is betting on plastic to protect its profitability. Ramping up plastic and petrochemical output, according to Nasser, will “provide a reliable destination for Saudi Aramco’s future oil production.” As one industry analyst observed of the company’s strategy, “the big picture imperative is to avoid being forced to leave barrels in the ground as demand for transportation fuels declines.”

Even ExxonMobil has acknowledged that electric vehicles’ widespread adoption will probably reduce cars’ need for oil. In one market forecast, the company, already the world’s largest producer of single-use plastics, assured investors that its plans to increase petrochemical production by 80 percent by 2050 will help the industry to pump and sell even more oil at mid-century than it does today.

But there is growing public awareness that all the plastic made for packaging and goods from the absurd to the essential comes at steep costs: the health impacts of the chemicals it contains, the emissions from its production, the mountains of waste that have built up as it is discarded, and the microplastics found everywhere from the most remote corners of the planet to our brains. Some governments have begun enacting legislation, such as bans on certain single-use items, but efforts to deliver more sweeping change hit a wall with the collapse in August of contentious negotiations on a global plastic-pollution treaty. More than 70 nations had pushed for limits on the amount of plastic produced to reduce the flow of waste into the environment. The industry has lobbied heavily against such caps, arguing that improved waste management and recycling are the solution, even though only a small percentage of plastic is currently recycled, and many types cannot be recycled by conventional means.

Companies “know they can’t hold their finger in the dike” of an energy transition, says Judith Enck, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official and president of Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group based at Bennington College. “They have to find a gigantic new market, and they have landed on plastic.”Plastic production has been rising steadily since the end of World War II, when companies poured resources into finding and promoting peacetime uses for a material whose military applications—from nylon parachutes to polyethylene insulation for radar sets—had proved invaluable. Consumers snapped up the flood of new goods and disposable packaging, and the annual output of plastic has climbed from two million metric tons in 1950 to more than 500 million today. A cumulative 8.3 billion metric tons had been produced by 2015, according to a landmark study that was the first to quantify the total amount of plastic created. According to Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who co-authored the study, the total has since risen past 10 billion metric tons. About three quarters of all that plastic has become waste, Geyer’s team reported: 9 percent was recycled, 12 percent was incinerated, and 79 percent ended up in landfills or the environment. If current trends continue, 1.1 billion metric tons of plastic will be made annually by 2050—and the cumulative total will be enough, Geyer says, to cover the U.S. in an ankle-deep layer.

Today, half of all plastic goes into single-use items, which are often tossed away almost as soon as they’re acquired. A million plastic bottles are purchased each minute, according to the United Nations’ environment agency, and five trillion plastic bags are used every year. In 2016, Americans alone used more than 560 billion plastic utensils and other disposable food-service items.

Plastic, of course, is not just in throwaway packaging. It is a defining, inescapable part of modern life, widely used in construction, clothing, electronic goods, and cars. It plays a key role in health care as a component in gloves, syringes, tubing, and IV bags, not to mention artificial joints, limbs, and hearts. It is also not just one material: there are thousands of types and subtypes, each with its own combination of chemicals that yields desired properties—varying degrees of hard or soft, rigid or flexible, opaque or transparent. One analysis found that 16,000 different chemicals are used in making plastics, including additives such as stabilizers, plasticizers, dyes, and flame retardants. More than 4,000 of those substances pose health or environmental dangers, and safety information was lacking for another 10,000, the researchers estimate.

By design, plastic does not readily decompose. Instead, it fragments into increasingly minuscule pieces—reaching down to the nanoscale—that have been found just about everywhere scientists have looked. They suffuse the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. They’ve been detected in blood, semen, breast milk, bone marrow, and placentas. Scientists are only beginning to explore what this omnipresence means for the health of humans and the environment, but the signs are worrying. One recent study found microplastics in tissue from human kidneys, livers, and brains, and a study of 12 dementia patients’ brains showed greater accumulations than those of people without the disease. Other research found the tiny particles in the neck-artery plaque of nearly 60 percent of patients tested; three years later, the rates of heart attacks, strokes, and death were 4.5 times higher among people whose samples contained microplastics.

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Buying toys this time of year can be so overwhelming. Everywhere you look, there’s some new, must-have toy being shoved in your face, and it’s incredibly hard to quiet the noise. You want to give your kids toys they’re excited about, but so many options means you’re bound to give them gifts that they are bored with 36 hours after opening the box. This year’s Romper Toy Box is all about toys that are made to last. Some are heirloom quality, some are sturdy and built to take a beating, and some are just the kind of simple toy we’ve forgotten about — the kind of toy that your kids can spend hours playing with.

From pretend play to activity sets, STEM kits, and more, this list has plenty of toys you won’t regret buying for your kids. There are varying price points, as well, and a lot of these are also chosen with you, the parent, in mind. Do you really need toys in your house that take two adults to set up, with 800 small pieces, only for your kids to be over it after 10 minutes?

I think every parent is looking for a toy that will unlock their child’s creativity, their love of play, and actually hold their attention — and that’s what Romper Toy Box 2025 is all about.

There are a million dollhouse options out there, but I love one that’s built to last, like The Dollhouse from Blueberry and Third. It comes completely blank, so you can decorate it however you want with paint, wallpaper, and accessories, and it’s built in a 1:12 scale, so you can add in your own furniture and dolls. It’s also enormous and just so classic. A great, heirloom-quality toy this Christmas.

I know it’s not new anymore, but my son has used his Yoto daily for over a year, and it still looks and works like it’s brand new. This year, we’re asking grandparents for the Yoto Club membership so my son can pick a new card or two each month (we keep them all in this inexpensive little organizer for compact storage and easy travel). We love the classic bedtime stories and the daily kids’ podcasts they put out, and that it’s nice screen-free background noise when we’re playing and drawing together.

I had a microscope set as a kid, and I still remember the countless hours I spent looking at the slides it came with and making my own from leaves, bugs, and feathers I found outside. For the curious kids in your life, it’s a top tier gift.

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Where Things Stand

• Defense bill: The House on Wednesday approved a $900 billion defense policy bill that would give U.S. troops a raise and codify much of President Trump’s national security agenda. It also seeks to curb his pullback from Europe and mandate more Pentagon consultation with Congress, including sharing unedited videos of attacks on suspected drug boats that officials have so far been unwilling to show lawmakers. The bill goes next to the Senate, which is also expected to approve it overwhelmingly, sending it to Mr. Trump for his signature. Read more ›

• Gold card: The Trump administration launched a website that opens up applications for a “gold card,” an expedited visa that the federal government plans to sell for at least $1 million to visitors who provide a “substantial benefit” to the country. It costs a nonrefundable $15,000 processing fee, then $1 million to “receive U.S. residency in record time” and become lawful permanent residents. Read more ›

National Guard deployment: A federal judge said the Trump administration must end its deployment of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the order, which was stayed until Monday. Read more ›

House Gives Bipartisan Approval to $900 Billion Defense Bill

The House on Wednesday approved a $900 billion defense policy bill that would codify much of President Trump’s national security agenda but seek to curb his move to withdraw from Europe and to mandate more Pentagon consultation with Congress.

The 312-112 vote on the legislation, which would provide a 3.8 percent pay raise to U.S. troops, reflected bipartisan support for what is commonly regarded as a must-pass bill. It goes next to the Senate, which is also expected to approve it overwhelmingly, sending it to Mr. Trump for his signature.

The House just approved 312-122 the final version of the annual defense policy bill, sending the must-pass, $900 billion legislation to the Senate, where lawmakers in that chamber are expected to vote next week on sending it to President Trump’s desk. The legislation would codify much of the president’s national security agenda, but also includes last-minute additions to exert congressional authority over decisions like troop withdrawals and the military campaign against suspected drug boats.

Trump administration opens applications for million-dollar visas.

The Trump administration debuted a website on Wednesday that opens up applications for a “gold card,” an expedited visa that the federal government plans to provide to people who pay at least $1 million.

To apply for the card, people have to pay a nonrefundable $15,000 processing fee, according to the site. After applicants are vetted and approved by the Department of Homeland Security, they will then have to pay $1 million to “receive U.S. residency in record time” and become lawful permanent residents.

Judge Emil Bove faces an ethics complaint for attending a Trump rally.

Judge Emil Bove III, a federal appeals court judge who made his career as a stalwart supporter of President Trump, is now facing a complaint over his attendance at a campaign-style rally held by Mr. Trump at a Pennsylvania casino resort on Tuesday.

The complaint, which was filed on Wednesday with the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and was written by Gabe Roth, who heads the advocacy group Fix the Court, said that Judge Bove’s attendance at the rally violated rules that prohibit judges from “the appearance of impropriety” and engaging in “political activity.”

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Speaker Mike Johnson at the Capitol on Wednesday.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times

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Right now, one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever built is scouring the surface of Mars. Supported by a team of hundreds of scientists back on Earth, the Perseverance rover has traveled nearly the distance of a marathon to answer some of the biggest questions about our neighboring world: What was the planet like eons ago? Was it ever habitable? Did it host life?

One rock visited by Perseverance, called Cheyava Falls, is speckled with iron-rich minerals that might be able to answer these questions, scientists announced in September. On Earth, the presence of these minerals usually means microbes that used iron in the chemical reactions essential to their metabolism once lived there. Does the same hold true on Mars? A piece of Cheyava Falls is safely tucked inside the rover’s storage cache. If it can be shipped to Earth, analysis with the full range of laboratory equipment here could tell us the answer.

But Cheyava Falls’s ride to our planet might have fallen through. The Perseverance rover is the first phase of a multistep mission to bring bits of Mars to Earth, known as Mars Sample Return (MSR), and the next step is dangling by a thread. The Trump administration has proposed canceling the return portion of the endeavor. The mission’s fate, as of press time, rests with the U.S. Congress.

The situation has dismayed scientists who have longed to get their hands on Martian rocks. “We’ve been working for so many decades to try to make this happen,” says Vicky Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute’s Colorado branch. Now that Perseverance has scooped up prized samples, scientists are faced with the prospect of leaving them on Mars to languish. “It’s hard to watch.”

Even if the mission isn’t canceled, how to finish it remains an open question. In 2024 NASA said it was scrapping its initial, troubled plan for MSR—deemed too costly and too far behind schedule—to seek cheaper commercial approaches. The agency now has multiple options on the table but has yet to decide which course to take, if any.

At stake are potentially profound insights about Mars. We know that some three billion to four billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, with lakes and seas on its surface. What we don’t know is whether life ever took hold there. Can we find out?

Perseverance touched down on Mars in February 2021 following a nail-biter of a landing. After the spacecraft had torn through the Martian atmosphere and descended toward the surface by parachute, a crablike, rocket-propelled platform called Sky Crane lowered the rover on cables to the surface. It landed inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) dent in the Martian landscape. A river once flowed there, and the bone-dry delta it left behind is visible from space.

If anything ever lived on Mars, Jezero is as good a place as any to look for signs of it. It’s nearly impossible, however, to send a mission to Mars that would be capable of finding life without help from labs on Earth. That’s why scientists have been lobbying since the 1960s for a way to bring pieces of Mars here.

MSR is the culmination of those efforts. In 2000, Scott Hubbard, NASA’s first Mars program director—sometimes called the “Mars Czar”—was tasked with turning around the fortunes of an ailing program that had experienced multiple failures in the 1990s, including the loss of two orbiters and a lander. “I took the existing program down to the roots, almost a bare sheet of paper,” Hubbard says. The top priority, he says, was to find out: “Did life ever exist on Mars, and could it be there today?”

Interest in Martian life had been spurred by a now infamous announcement from the White House lawn in 1996, when President Bill Clinton declared that signs of life had been detected in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. That claim was later refuted—but it caused enough clamor to put the search for Martian life at the top of NASA’s agenda.

NASA put a plan in place. Rovers and orbiters would probe the planet to identify good places to look for evidence of life. Then a rover would head there to grab samples, and a third phase would bring them to Earth. In 2012, NASA announced the Mars 2020 mission, which would land a rover, later named Perseverance, to collect the samples. By 2030, a follow-up mission would collect these samples and return them to Earth at an estimated cost of slightly less than $6 billion. Perseverance launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in July 2020. Not far behind, scientists hoped, the retrieval mission would follow.

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A man on a plane TikTok’ed about getting a refund after a baby in a nearby aisle cried for 45 minutes. That man was a dick. A few years back, a lady on a South Korea–to–US flight gave out handwritten notes and care packages—earplugs, gum, candies—to atone for flying with a baby who might cry. That woman was a benevolent fool.

I can’t get my head around either of those standards—neither the “I’m sorry I cannot control the behavior of this defenseless human in my arms” position, nor this new “Why has this baby ruined my day?” schtick.

It’s the season of mass travel, December being the month we have to touch base with uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even MAGA-hatted distant cousins, lest we summon bad tidings and bah-humbugs—especially when a newborn’s involved. This time of year, it’s your duty as a parent to serve up your baby, oft dressed in velvet and doily, to cooing relations.

I am a loud person by nature—God blessed me with a voice that carries—but the thought of negatively impacting someone else’s experience with my presence is, by no stretch of the imagination, mortifying. I don’t talk during the movie or use speakerphone for public calls. But I have no qualms about my daughter’s lack of absolute silence in any situation. I’m sure you can Labrador-train a child to be seen and not heard, but a new-ish-born baby is a lasso of foghorns you can’t predict the trigger for, and parenting toddlers, on the whole, is fighting for your fucking life—every minute trying to swerve the carnage mainly seen in disaster movies. Many a traveling parent knows the piercing pain of their kid melting down when they should be buckling up, and shoving Cheeto after Cheeto into their mouth, or a sticky iPad into their stickier hands, to ease the onset of Armageddon. You’ve heard the verging-on-shrill pitch to their voice, the rising panic as their mile-high cub breaks the sound barrier.

To state the blindingly obvious: Babies cry. Without vocab or motor skills, a baby can’t indicate even the smallest discomfort without Niagara-ing into their bibs. If a baby is wet, they cry. If a baby is tired, they cry. If a baby is hungry, they cry. A baby can cry at the scratchy label in a onesie, a slight gust of cold air, the 12-second gap between Ms. Rachel videos. A baby’s Spotify Wrapped is just the sound of them wailing at different pitches.

And it should go without saying that a baby crying isn’t a reflection on the parent or their parenting style. Happy, non-future-serial-killer babies cry. Well-watered, well-tended babies cry. A baby that doesn’t cry may seem aspirational for Christmas travel, but it’s more likely an issue for a medic.

I’m wondering what brings people online to bemoan babies crying on flights. Were they expecting to be shielded from the general public when they purchased their ticket for public travel? Were they hoping to pay for extra soundproofing along with their legroom? There’s something about the echo chamber of social media that has siloed us into hyper-individuals, fixated not only on our personal experience but on the things that threaten it. Rather than co-exist, we have refused to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.

The public-shaming aspect, especially of mothers, carries a certain subtext; it’s about a woman failing to disappear into the passing montage of a man’s day—about making herself known to him without courting his attention. There’s a sense that a woman is meant to carry out her job as a mother in perfect silence, like a fresco of the Madonna and child.

But the people judging babies that cry seem to forget that they were once babies that cried. And in a way, the complainers are still the babies—unable to modify their own emotions, to empathize, to rationalize. Where a baby lacks the development to properly express themselves, the complainers lack the maturity to shut up and noise-cancel. Instead of acting out, what they really need to do is grow up.

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Collage by Vogue; Photo: Getty Images

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