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U.S. Women’s Soccer Coach Vlatko Andonovski Resigns

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Vlatko Andonovski, the head coach of the United States women’s national soccer team, has resigned, three people with direct knowledge of the situation said Wednesday, ending a relatively tumultuous tenure managing what was once the world’s pre-eminent team.

The U.S. Soccer Federation plans to announce Andonovski’s departure as coach on Thursday, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the move publicly.

Andonovski’s four-year contract was scheduled to expire at the end of the year. U.S. Soccer will appoint an interim coach for two friendly matches this fall but hopes to have a permanent replacement named by the end of the year in order to begin preparations for next summer’s Paris Olympics.

Andonovski’s resignation was not unexpected. The United States greatly underperformed at this year’s Women’s World Cup after winning the previous two tournaments. The team had its earliest elimination in tournament history after losing a penalty shootout to rival Sweden in the round of 16. The United States scored only four goals in a World Cup it entered as one of the favorites, beating only one of its four opponents, Vietnam, and drawing with the Netherlands and Portugal during the group stage.

Andonovski, 46, had been a head coach in the National Women’s Soccer League for seven years before U.S. Soccer announced his hiring in October 2019. His predecessor, Jill Ellis, stepped down after five years with the team after the United States won the 2019 Women’s World Cup, making Ellis the first coach to win back-to-back Women’s World Cups.

Andonovski won the first 16 games he coached, including titles in 2020 at the Concacaf Olympic qualifying tournament and the SheBelieves Cup. The coronavirus pandemic struck six months into Andonovski’s tenure, pushing the Tokyo Olympics back a year to 2021 and complicating his first two years on the job. Once the Games came around, the United States entered as favorites but won only a bronze medal.

As the World Cup began, the United States’ ability to capture an elusive three-peat — no team has won three titles in a row since the tournament’s inception in 1991 — was called into question almost immediately. The Americans beat Vietnam in their opening game, but by a comparatively modest 3-0 margin, nothing like the 13-0 romp over Thailand that opened their 2019 title run. The Americans would score only once more, on a header from Lindsey Horan that evened the score with the Netherlands, 1-1.

A scoreless tie with Portugal was enough for the United States to advance but not win its group, spurring the need for a “Belief” social media campaign heading into the round of 16 and opening the national team up to criticism from its own, with former players such as Tobin Heath and Carli Lloyd voicing dissatisfaction with the team’s style of play.

Andonovski was criticized for his tactical decision-making, including his decisions on substitutes. He also had star players like Alex Morgan and Julie Ertz playing different roles than they had in the past, with mixed results. Exciting newcomers like Ashley Sanchez and 18-year-old Alyssa Thompson barely played.

In the end, a millimeter was the threshold to let Sweden advance and stop the United States — and Andonovski — miles short of expectations.

Appeals Court Upholds Legality of Abortion Pill but With Significant Restrictions

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A federal appeals court panel said on Wednesday that the abortion pill mifepristone should remain legal in the United States but with significant restrictions on patients’ access to it, setting up a showdown before the Supreme Court on the fate of the most common method of terminating pregnancies.

The decision, which would prohibit the pill from being sent through the mail or prescribed by telemedicine, is the latest development in a closely watched lawsuit that seeks to remove abortion pills entirely from the market by invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone. But for now, the ruling will have no real-world effect: In April, the Supreme Court said mifepristone would have to remain available under the current rules until the appeals process concludes.

Anti-abortion groups filed the lawsuit last year, several months after the Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Shortly after the appeals court ruled on Wednesday, the Justice Department said it would ask the justices to hear the case.

The court is likely to act in the coming months. It could deny review, leaving in place the appeals court’s ruling, curbing but not eliminating access to the pill. Or it could agree to hear the appeal, returning to contested terrain that at least some of the justices might prefer to avoid.

The justices will be navigating against the backdrop of their decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade, a ruling that led to a sharp drop in the court’s approval ratings, questions about its legitimacy and a political windfall for Democrats.

In that 6-to-3 decision, the conservative majority made a kind of promise, saying that the court was ceding the question of the availability of abortion “to the people and their elected representatives.” That could indicate a reluctance of hear a new abortion case.

On the other hand, a question of such significance would seem to warrant a ruling from the nation’s highest court. The case could also have implications beyond abortion, calling into question the F.D.A.’s regulatory authority over other drugs.

In the new ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld part of a sweeping decision issued in April by a federal judge in Texas. That decision, by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump and has publicly espoused anti-abortion views, effectively nullified the F.D.A.’s approval of the pill.

But the appeals court decision kept the F.D.A.’s approval in place. It also kept in place a later F.D.A. approval of the generic version of the drug, which now accounts for about two-thirds of the mifepristone sold in the United States.

The main impact of the appeals court’s decision, if it is upheld by the Supreme Court, would be to reverse changes made by the F.D.A. in recent years that greatly increased access to the pill, partly by allowing some health care providers who are not doctors to prescribe mifepristone and allowing patients to obtain the pill without visiting a provider in person. The appeals court ruling would mean that patients would have to make three visits to a doctor to get mifepristone and could not receive it in the mail.

The ability for patients to use telemedicine and get the prescribed pills shipped to them has significantly expanded the use of medication abortion, which is now used in more than half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.

The lawsuit was filed against the F.D.A. by several anti-abortion doctors and a consortium of anti-abortion medical groups called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which was incorporated in Amarillo, Texas, soon after Roe had been overturned. The case was filed in Amarillo.

The appeals court majority wrote that the statute of limitations appeared to bar a challenge to the F.D.A.’s initial approval of mifepristone in 2000. It said that the approval of generic mifepristone in 2019 should also remain in effect because the plaintiffs had not shown that they had been adversely affected by that approval.

Judge Jennifer W. Elrod, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Judge Cory T. Wilson, who was appointed by Mr. Trump. The decision said that changes the F.D.A. had made in 2016 and 2021 should be rolled back.

“In loosening mifepristone’s safety restrictions, F.D.A. failed to address several important concerns about whether the drug would be safe for the women who use it,” Judge Elrod wrote. “It failed to consider the cumulative effect of removing several important safeguards at the same time.”

Among the changes the F.D.A. made in 2016 were to allow nurse midwives and certain other providers, not just doctors, to prescribe mifepristone and to reduce the required number of in-person visits to one. Another change was to extend the time frame for mifepristone use, authorizing it until 10 weeks into pregnancy instead of seven weeks. (The appeals court decision would have less practical impact on that time frame, however, because physicians in most states can legally use medical discretion to prescribe mifepristone until 12 weeks into pregnancy, as there is scientific evidence that abortion pills are safe and effective within that time frame.)

In 2021, the F.D.A. lifted the in-person dispensing requirement altogether, allowing abortion pills to be prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to patients. That decision paved the way for numerous telemedicine abortion services, which have increasingly been supplying the pills to patients.

More than five million women in the United States have used mifepristone to terminate their pregnancies, and many studies have found it to be highly safe and effective. Years of research has shown that serious complications are rare, resulting in fewer than 1 percent of patients needing hospitalization, medical experts have said. The F.D.A. applies a special regulatory framework to mifepristone, meaning that it has been regulated much more strictly and studied more intensively than most other drugs. The drug is also approved for use in dozens of other countries.

In the United States, the medication abortion protocol typically involves taking mifepristone — which blocks a hormone that allows a pregnancy to develop — followed one or two days later by another drug, misoprostol, which causes contractions similar to a miscarriage to expel pregnancy tissue.

If access to mifepristone were limited, abortion providers might have to rely solely on misoprostol, which can be used on its own but is somewhat less effective and more prone to causing side effects.

Judge James C. Ho, another Trump appointee on the appeals court panel, wrote a caustic partial dissent, saying he would invalidate the approval of mifepristone in 2000.

“Scientists have contributed an enormous amount to improving our lives,” Judge Ho wrote. “But scientists are human beings just like the rest of us. They’re not perfect. None of us are. We all make mistakes. And the F.D.A. has made plenty.”

Two American Tourists Caught Sleeping in the Eiffel Tower

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The opening of the Eiffel Tower was delayed on Monday morning after security officials found two American tourists sleeping in the monument overnight, officials said.

“They were detected in the early morning by the Sete security service, during daily rounds of checks carried out before the monument was opened to the public,” according to the Eiffel Tower’s operator, Sociéte d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, also known as Sete. The operator said it would file a complaint about the two intruders, who posed no threat and were handed over to the police.

The Paris prosecutor’s office was informed on Monday morning that two American men had been found sleeping on the site of the Eiffel Tower after entering with tickets on Sunday night, according to a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, who said that alcohol was involved. She did not know where in the Eiffel Tower the men were discovered.

One of the world’s most recognizable landmarks, the Eiffel Tower was built from 1887 to 1889 to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution and stands at 1,083 feet. It receives about seven million visitors a year.

American tourists have been flocking to Europe this summer. The number of planned air arrivals to Paris for July and August has increased 14.4 percent this year, and is now nearly 5 percent above the level in 2019, before the pandemic.

Honolulu Burn Unit Put to the Test by Fires in Maui

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When Dr. David C. Cho’s phone rang in the middle of the night, it was an emergency room physician calling from Maui, two islands away, seeking help.

“In very plain and simple terms he said, ‘Lahaina is destroyed,’” recalled Dr. Cho, a plastic surgeon who works in the burn unit at Straub Medical Center in Honolulu. “And then it just went silent.”

Dr. Cho got out of bed, went to the hospital and waited.

“I just knew there was going to be a pipeline of patients,” he said.

As hurricane-fanned flames overwhelmed Maui last week and rescue crews worked frantically to reach the wounded, some survivors’ injuries proved too extensive for that island’s hospitals and needed the most intensive burn care available. Nine burn patients were flown nearly 100 miles to Honolulu and then driven by ambulance to Straub, whose burn unit is the only facility of its kind in Hawaii, and the only one in the North Pacific between California and Asia.

At the Honolulu hospital, doctors and nurses went to work trying to stabilize the crush of new arrivals, who ranged in age from young adults to seniors, and whose second- and third-degree burns in some cases covered up to 70 percent of their bodies.

For the doctors, the nine arriving victims represented the largest influx of patients from a single incident in the burn unit’s history. As consumed as the medical workers were with the extraordinary needs of these patients, another question lingered: Might more be flown in soon — more people who could be saved?

Back on Maui, what would become the country’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century was still not contained, and newly homeless evacuees from Lahaina, an oceanside town that was once the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom, were pouring into shelters. Inside the operating rooms and yellow-walled hallways of the burn unit in downtown Honolulu, there was no time to learn those details.

“As a surgeon, you have to just take it one step at a time and take care of the patient in front of you,” Dr. Cho said in an interview inside the hospital this week. “In fact, I probably was one of the least-informed persons on the island in that first 36 hours because I didn’t have time to know what was on CNN.”

Hospital officials declined to provide specifics on the conditions of patients from the wildfire, citing privacy concerns.

But the disaster underscored the reason the unit was created, said Dr. Robert W. Schulz, a plastic surgeon who co-founded the unit with Dr. James Penoff.

Until the 1980s, there was no burn treatment facility in Hawaii, which meant doctors had to track down airplanes to transport people to the mainland to receive specialized care. Too often, patients died before they got there. And even when they did make it to California, they would sometimes spend long hospital stints away from their families, undergoing painful treatments.

Dr. Schulz, the unit’s medical director, was among those treating the Maui patients in recent days. He described working to make sure victims losing vast amounts of blood received enough fluid. He recounted long stretches in the operating room that started in the morning and lasted until 8 at night. And he cautioned that with many burn patients, the worst days of treatment are not the first ones.

“You come in, you’re articulate for about 12 hours, and then, you know, you’re now medicated so much that for the next three to four months you’re in continual surgery,” Dr. Schulz said, speaking generally about patients with extensive injuries.

Kimberly Webster, a registered nurse who is the manager of the burn unit and a critical care unit at Straub, said she had been following the weather early last week, aware that intense dryness and high winds from a hurricane off Hawaii’s coast had increased the fire danger. She said she had tracked those reports in the same way she might monitor the Fourth of July, when the proliferation of fireworks increases the possibility of severe burns. But there was no pre-emptive effort to add staff or clear rooms.

“You’re alert and you’re aware of that,” said Ms. Webster, “but you don’t start moving people when you don’t need to.”

That started to change on the evening of Aug. 8, as the first reports of destruction on Maui began to filter in. Early on, Ms. Webster said, there were indications that around 10 patients might need to be flown in. But much remained unclear.

Given Honolulu’s geography, the doctors and nurses at Straub are used to treating patients arriving by plane. The unit regularly takes in burn victims from other islands in Hawaii, from U.S. territories like Guam, from Pacific nations like Micronesia and from cargo ships at sea.

But those patients usually come one or two at a time. The volume of new arrivals from the wildfire and the speed with which they arrived became a singular event in the careers of the doctors and nurses.

As doctors at Straub spoke with their counterparts on Maui, in some cases reviewing photos or videos of wounds, they made decisions on which patients needed to be transferred. In some less severe cases, patients can receive care outside a formal burn unit. In other instances, a person’s burns might be so extensive, and their prognosis so poor, that focusing on their comfort is more appropriate than putting them through a flight.

“But it’s that big piece in the middle that you can provide a quality of life and a real benefit,” Dr. Schulz said. “They’re now treatable and you can save them and you have this facility that can do it for them that is not 2,000 miles away.”

Advances in treatment in recent decades, including the development of skin substitutes, have improved the long-term outlook for people who sustain massive burns. Still, hospital stays regularly last for months and involve painful daily treatments and repeated surgeries.

In many cases, surgeons must remove healthy skin and graft it onto parts of the body that burned. But after one graft, it takes time for skin to grow back to allow for another. And for patients with burns on 70 percent of their body, there is relatively little healthy skin left to graft from in the first place.

In between surgeries, nurses work to keep the wounds clean, properly bandaged and free from infection. In a small room with waterproof flooring and heated ceiling tiles in a corner of the burn unit, nurses in plastic gowns will methodically wash wounds, sometimes spending two hours with a single patient. The room is warmed to about 85 degrees, Ms. Webster said, a temperature that helps stave off hypothermia for patients without skin but that can leave medical providers drenched in sweat.

“It’s uncomfortable for the patients,” Ms. Webster said of the washing process, and “it can be uncomfortable for the nursing staff.”

In interviews, medical providers in the unit, many of whom are longtime Hawaii residents, said they found deep meaning in being able to help their state through the fire. But with the known death toll now at 99 and likely to increase, they lamented that they had not had the chance to save more people.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Dr. Cho said. “I wish there were more transfers coming in — that’s my real reflection.”

The symptoms and how dangerous it is

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There’s a new COVID-19 variant dominating infections in the U.S. EG.5 — or “Eris,” as it’s been nicknamed — was identified in China in February and detected in the U.S. in April, and now accounts for more than 17% of COVID-19 cases nationwide, which is the most of any variant.

Here’s what you need to know about the new variant.

How do symptoms compare to other COVID-19 variants?

“We haven’t seen a radical departure that [EG.5] is going to cause new symptoms or that it’s going to look a lot different,” Dr. David Alain Wohl, an infectious diseases professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tells Yahoo Life. “We don’t see anything that indicates that the virus is evolving to be more dangerous.”

EG.5 is a subvariant within the Omicron family of coronaviruses, so it’s pretty closely related to the XBB variant that’s been circulating for a while and was dominant months earlier. You can’t tell which variant you have just based on symptoms (that requires genomic sequencing, which isn’t a routine part of clinical care). But you can expect symptoms from EG.5 to look a lot like what we’ve come to know from other COVID-19 variants, including:

“We’re at a very, very early stage of the game,” Dr. Jessica Justman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University School of Public Health and senior technical director at ICAP, tells Yahoo Life. “But from everything I’m seeing and reading and hearing, there’s no reason to think that this variant is likely to be more virulent, to cause more severe symptoms, to cause more hospitalizations or more deaths than any of the other more recent variants.”

The World Health Organization has classified EG.5 as a “variant of interest,” but said it doesn’t seem to pose any more of a public health threat than other variants. But while EG.5 doesn’t appear to be any more dangerous, experts say it isn’t any weaker either. If your symptoms from EG.5 seem less severe than what you experienced with a previous COVID-19 illness, it’s not because the virus is losing strength — it could be the result of your own built-up resilience.

“It’s very hard to interpret new symptoms with a new subvariant, because not only is the virus different, but we’re different. We have more immunity,” Wohl explains. “If you have more immunity because you had Omicron before, or you had the vaccine, or you had a booster, that changes how the virus is going to impact you. So you will likely see fewer respiratory infections deep down in the lungs.”

Is Eris more or less contagious?

A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Politico that “there is no evidence indicating EG.5 is able to spread more easily, and currently available treatments and vaccines are expected to continue to be effective against this variant.”

So why the increase in cases? Every year, we’ve seen a slight rise in COVID cases in the summer, so experts say the recent uptick isn’t too surprising.

“If you look at a graph of hospitalizations going back over three years, this is the smallest uptick so far,” Justman says. “[There were] 9,000 admissions in the last week in the United States due to COVID, as of July 29. Last summer, around the same time, it was 45,000. So it’s just a completely different order of magnitude. This is a very small uptick.”

Justman points out that with the ubiquity of at-home test kits that can be used outside a doctor’s office, new case counts likely underestimate how many new cases are out there and aren’t as reliable as higher-quality data, such as hospitalizations and emergency room visits. So it could take a while before we get the full picture of how prevalent EG.5 really is.

“The way COVID works is, first there’s a rise in the number of cases, then there’s a rise in hospitalizations, usually between a week or two weeks after the rise in cases. And then the deaths — if there’s going to be an increase in deaths — will take at least another couple of weeks,” she says. “So it’s a little too soon to be confident that this is not going to have a higher mortality rate, but there’s no evidence yet to say that it does have a higher mortality rate.”

Will vaccines and boosters protect me from EG.5?

Although the bivalent vaccine currently in use was designed to work against the BA.5 subvariant, which accounted for most COVID cases last summer, Wohl says it still appears to offer some protection, because there’s just enough overlap between these Omicron subvariants.

The new vaccine that will be available this fall is designed to combat XBB, which is one subvariant removed from EG.5.

“It’s going to be really hard to completely keep up with every single dominant variant that’s circulating on the planet, but XBB will be a step closer to getting us a kind of protection against what’s circulating, at least right now,” Wohl says.

While the ideal vaccine would make us totally impervious to infection, breakthrough cases can happen even among fully vaccinated individuals. But experts say the key thing to keep in mind is that vaccines are an important defense against severe illness, hospitalization and death.

“Vaccine and boosters always help,” Justman says. “They increase your antibody levels, they give a reminder, a tune up to your cell-mediated immunity, particularly your T cells, so that they’re all in a better position to combat any variant.”

What does this new variant tell us about future variants and COVID-19 going forward?

As with COVID seasons past, we should brace for a bigger surge of infections in the late fall and winter. And because the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates so rapidly, Justman says we’re likely to continue to see new variants emerge in the future.

“I’m really glad we’re paying attention, because one day, a variant could or will come along that is different,” Wohl says. “A variant will come along that our immunity just doesn’t actually recognize as well, either from previous infections or from our vaccines. That’s why we have to be nimble.”

James Harden Did Not Start the Problems for the Philadelphia 76ers

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For Philadelphia 76ers fans, this is The Bad Place.

“Disgust among Sixers fans is at one of the highest levels I have ever seen here in Philadelphia,” Joe DeCamara, a Philadelphia radio host, said in a recent interview.

A confluence of misfortune and bad strategy has almost left the team where it was in the mid-2000s at the end of the Allen Iverson era: adrift with no path to contend for a championship. Whatever plans Daryl Morey, the team’s president of basketball operations, had when he took over in 2020 seem to have unraveled.

“We feel like people are underrating the Sixers right now,” Morey told reporters at his introductory news conference, “but we need to go out there and prove it.”

What has been proved, in fact, is quite the opposite, punctuated recently when James Harden, the team’s second-best player, publicly trashed Morey as part of his quest to force a trade to another team.

Discontent is not new for star players, but in the Sixers’ case it has become very public at a moment when their fans are at their wits’ end. The broader public has developed an appetite for this brand of superstar drama because it pops up every summer, but the Sixers, perhaps more than other N.B.A. teams, are poorly positioned to plea for patience because the organization has put its fans through a decade of stops and starts, including the rebuilding plan known as The Process.

Harden’s relationship with the Sixers became a Good News-Bad News situation this summer. The Good: Harden, a 33-year-old guard, opted into the last year of his contract. The Bad: It was on the condition that the Sixers trade him to the Los Angeles Clippers, according to two people familiar with the request but not authorized to discuss it publicly. To make matters worse, videos that emerged on social media this week appeared to show Harden disparaging Morey while speaking to reporters at an Adidas event in China.

“Daryl Morey is a liar and I will never be a part of an organization that he’s a part of,” Harden said in the videos. Harden’s agent and Adidas did not respond to requests from The New York Times seeking to confirm the authenticity of the videos. A Sixers spokesperson declined to comment.

The exact nature of Harden’s anger at Morey is unclear, but his displeasure is an extraordinary setback nonetheless. Harden is one of the greatest offensive players ever, and few defenders can guard him alone because of his combination of ball handling and size. He is one of a small number of players who can will a team to victory by themselves — when he chooses.

Harden and Joel Embiid, the star center who is Philadelphia’s best player and the reigning Most Valuable Player Award winner, share some of the responsibility for the Sixers’ lack of success. They often underperform at crucial moments in the postseason, and did so again this spring, when the Sixers lost to Boston in the second round.

This has brought even more pessimism to Philadelphia, where sports-related despair is as essential to the city’s identity as the hoagie.

“As a fan, it’s simple: I want the team to win,” said Amos Lee, a folk singer-songwriter and avid Sixers fan. “I want them to spend all of the money and get all of the best players and put the coolest people on the team and that’s it. But I don’t know what this franchise is.”

Lee added, “It has been for a long time really poorly managed.”

The Sixers have not made it to the Eastern Conference finals since 2001, and Doc Rivers, who was hired as head coach a few weeks before Morey joined the team, had a history of falling short in the playoffs. Still, Morey kept him for three seasons. And after Ben Simmons, the star point guard drafted two years after Embiid, demanded a trade out of Philadelphia, Morey resisted before swinging a trade for Harden, who was trying to force his way off his second straight team. Now Philadelphia is his third.

According to a person familiar with Morey’s thinking, the plan remains to bring Harden back after the Sixers ended trade negotiations with the Clippers when they could not reach what they believed would be a suitable deal.

That is not a plan — that’s unjustified hope. Harden has shown that he is willing to hold out or loaf on the floor if he does not get the trade he wants. And even if Harden returns, the team did not make any real improvements this off-season and, in fact, lost several rotation players to free agency. If the 76ers could not get out of the second round last year, how will they do next season with a less-talented team and an unhappy Harden?

If Harden does go, he will be the latest in a string of Sixers stars who have left the team under acrimonious circumstances, stretching back to Charles Barkley in 1992. Before Simmons and Harden, Iverson was frustrated with the franchise when he was traded in 2006, as was Andre Iguodala when he was traded in 2012.

Morey has long shown little interest in fielding a struggling team. When he was an executive in Houston in 2019, he traded Chris Paul and multiple first-round picks for Russell Westbrook after the Rockets lost in the second round of the Western Conference playoffs. Before that, Morey dismantled a middling Rockets team that included a young Kyle Lowry. Those moves allowed the Rockets in 2012 to acquire the star who would push them toward true contention: Harden.

If Morey decides to hit the eject button on the Embiid and Harden era in Philadelphia, after less than two full seasons, he has shown a willingness to make hard choices. But that requires patience Sixers fans do not have, and asking the team’s ownership to accept a near-term regression and financial hit while they are planning for a new arena.

But the clock is not just ticking on what to do about Harden. It is also ticking on Embiid. He said recently that he wanted to win a championship whether it was in Philadelphia “or anywhere else.” He later suggested that he was not serious, though that has not eased the anxiety of some Sixers fans.

On one hand, fans could understand his restlessness. He has endured several different front office heads, a coaching carousel and unhappy stars without even a conference finals appearance to show for it. But on the other hand, those same coaches, executives and teammates have had to endure his disappointing playoff performances, too.

“They have not done a great job around him,” said Spike Eskin, co-host of “The Rights To Ricky Sanchez,” a Sixers fan podcast that is unaffiliated with the team. “The organization has been a mess for the entirety of his career. But he is as much to blame for their lack of success in the playoffs as anybody is.”

But for now, Morey does not have many options. That is partly on him. The best option in a sea of bad ones may be to engage in some wishful thinking: Maybe Harden shows up to camp in great shape and reconsiders his desire to leave. Maybe Embiid puts together another M.V.P.-level season and does not get hurt, as he so often has.

Maybe they can even get out of the second round.

ADHD Medication Shortage Continues as the School Year Begins

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In the spring, Riana Shaw Robinson learned that her 11-year-old son, Madison, had sprinted out of class to chase a squirrel through his school’s courtyard in Berkeley, Calif.

It’s not how her sixth grader would typically behave. But that day Madison hadn’t taken his Adderall — the medication that, in his words, helps his brain slow down, “from 100 miles per hour — like a car — to 70 miles per hour.”

Ms. Robinson said Adderall worked better for her son than the other medications they had used to treat his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. With Adderall, he was calmer and better able to focus.

“He actually had a taste for what relief could look like,” Ms. Robinson said.

But for nearly a year now the medication — Madison takes the generic version — has been difficult to find. He has had to skip doses, sometimes for up to two weeks, because nearby pharmacies have been out of stock.

The family is rationing his pills this summer so that Madison, who recently turned 12, will have them during the school year.

“We try to manage with a couple of caffeine drinks during the day and soccer in the afternoons,” Ms. Robinson said, strategies that she said have helped her son regulate his emotions.

In July, the Food and Drug Administration posted more shortages in A.D.H.D medications, adding generic versions of Concerta and two types of Vyvanse capsules to the list. And in August, the F.D.A. and the Drug Enforcement Administration took the rare step of issuing a joint public letter acknowledging the shortage and asking manufacturers to increase production.

A representative from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which makes Vyvanse, said in an email that a “manufacturing delay, which we are actively working to resolve,” had created a temporary disruption in the supply of certain Vyvanse capsules, adding that “we expect this to continue into September 2023.”

Parents and caregivers across the country are spending hours each month hunting down pharmacies with A.D.H.D. medication in stock and asking their doctors to either transfer or rewrite prescriptions, a process many equate to having a second job. Others pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for name-brand drugs that are sometimes more readily available but, unlike generics, are not covered by their insurance. Some children end up taking similar but less effective medications or go without medication for months at a time because their families do not have the extra time or cash.

A.D.H.D., which is often characterized by inattention, disorganization, hyperactivity and impulsivity, is one of the most common childhood neurodevelopmental disorders. Because of the medication shortage, children across the country with the condition fell behind in their schoolwork over the spring, and their relationships often suffered as they struggled to regulate their emotions, according to interviews with multiple doctors and parents. Meanwhile, they all wonder: Why is this happening, and when will it end?

One of the cruelest aspects of the A.D.H.D. medication shortage, some parents have said, has been the collateral damage to their children’s self-esteem.

Kari Debbink, who lives in Bowie, Md., said her daughter, who is about to enter her senior year of high school, would lose motivation to do her school work when her A.D.H.D. medication, Concerta, was not available in either the brand name or the generic version. Her grades, which had typically been B’s, plummeted — and so did her confidence.

“Once she got behind, she couldn’t catch up,” Ms. Debbink said. “By the end of the year, we were just trying to prevent her from failing classes.”

Drew Tolliver, 12, who lives in DeKalb, Ill., typically takes the generic version of Concerta, but since February, his family has had difficulty finding it.

When taking the medication regularly, Drew said, “I felt like I knew myself.”

“I felt like a better me,” he added, “like how ‘myself’ should be.”

His mother Amy Tolliver recently located the medicine — but she had to pick it up 40 minutes away from the gas company where she works 10-hour shifts, six days a week.

In the spring, Drew would refuse to go to class when he didn’t have his medication, said Michelle Tolliver, Amy’s wife and Drew’s second parent. She and Amy sometimes relented and allowed him to stay home.

“I hated to see him feel like he failed,” Michelle Tolliver said.

Because A.D.H.D. medications are considered controlled substances, patients are required to get a new prescription for each 30-day supply.

“I was on hold for 50 minutes waiting to talk to a pharmacist,” Dr. David Grunwald, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Berkeley, Calif., said of a recent call to track down A.D.H.D. medication for a child whose mother has a chronic illness and cannot spend hours on the phone.

In his practice, he said, long hold times with large pharmacy chains are becoming the norm.

“It feels like a game where you don’t know which stimulant is going to be in short supply each week or month,” he said. “It’s very frustrating.”

Dr. Kali Cyrus, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Washington, D.C., has had to call pharmacies so often that she is planning to hire someone to help her check availability. Right now she tries to squeeze in calls throughout the day, including in the morning, when she is making breakfast or walking her dog.

In her sessions with patients, she said, she sometimes has to decide “how to combine different strengths or formulations to get my patient their normal dose — or as close as we can,” or switch to another stimulant that is more available.

Changing medications can result in a less effective treatment, doctors say, because certain stimulants work better for some people than others. Even switching from name-brand drugs to generic versions can be problematic. Generic versions of Concerta, for example, may not release their drugs over time in the same way as the original.

Because of the shortage, Paige and Leo, who live in Northern California, are now giving their 7-year-old son, Andy, the drug Metadate, which they say lasts only six hours. (The family asked to be referred to by their middle names to protect their privacy.)

This means that Andy then requires an additional dose in the afternoon, administered during his after-school program. Sometimes the staff would forget, Paige said.

When that happened, “we would get a call like, ‘Your kid’s out of control,’” Leo said.

For children with A.D.H.D. who have trouble functioning in daily life, stimulant medications like amphetamines (Adderall) and methylphenidate (including Ritalin and Concerta), have long been considered the gold standard of treatment by psychiatrists and pediatricians.

“They are one of our most effective treatments in psychiatry — period,” said Dr. Alecia Vogel-Hammen, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine. “They have been life-changing.”

In recent years, these drugs have been in high demand. The use of prescription stimulants to treat A.D.H.D. doubled from 2006 to 2016. And between the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, the percentage of people who had a prescription filled for a stimulant rose by more than 10 percent among some adults and teens, according to an analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The growing numbers — and the ease of being evaluated via telehealth — have raised concerns that some people are being misdiagnosed and that stimulants for A.D.H.D. are being overprescribed, or abused by people who do not have A.D.H.D. but who use the drug to be more productive in school or at work. But this is not the case across the board. Studies have found that girls, people of color and those who identify as L.G.B.T.Q. are often underdiagnosed and undertreated for A.D.H.D.

Doctors say demand for A.D.H.D. medications has also risen because of increasing awareness about the condition in both children and adults.

The disruption in A.D.H.D. medications mirrors the shortage of hundreds of other types of drugs, including generic forms of chemotherapy, that have fallen victim to a faltering pharmaceutical supply chain.

Typically, drug shortages are tied to a single manufacturing facility, said Michael Ganio, an expert in drug shortages at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

But in this case, according to the F.D.A.’s online drug database, the A.D.H.D. medication shortage now involves several manufacturers — mostly those who make generic drugs — and has been ongoing since the fall of last year. On the F.D.A.’s website, the reasons offered by each manufacturer are sometimes as opaque as “regulatory delay” or “other.” Others say “shortage of active ingredient” or “increased demand.”

Some manufacturers have given specific time frames for when the issues might be resolved, such as “mid-August.” But it is unclear when that will translate to restocked pharmacy shelves.

Because controlled substances have a high potential for abuse, the D.E.A. sets limits on how many of these drugs can be produced. But in 2022, the manufacturers of amphetamine medications produced about 1 billion fewer doses than they were permitted to make, according to government records. They did not fully meet their quotas in 2020 or 2021 either.

When asked for more specifics about which companies were not meeting the quotas or whether any companies had asked to increase their quotas, a D.E.A. official responded that details about each company’s quotas are considered confidential.

“The fact that there’s no information is just that much more frustrating,” Dr. Ganio said.

Emails to the drug manufacturers currently described as having a shortage of A.D.H.D. medications provided little clarity as to when the problems might be resolved. A representative from Teva Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Adderall, said it was continuing to see “unprecedented demand” that may cause “intermittent delays” but that it planned to produce the full amount of doses it was permitted to make. Granules Pharmaceuticals, which makes the generic equivalent of Adderall XR and Adderall IR, said it had requested to raise its D.E.A. quota.

Another factor potentially driving the shortage: a $21 billion settlement brokered between three pharmaceutical distributors and most states that placed new requirements on pharmaceutical companies to help stem the flow of controlled substances like prescription painkillers. It has resulted in tens of thousands of drug orders being canceled, including those for A.D.H.D. drugs.

“There is a higher level of scrutiny on all controlled-substance ordering by pharmacies,” said Ilisa Bernstein, a senior vice president at the American Pharmacists Association. “It’s created a perfect storm.”

Suzana, who lives in Tennessee and asked to be referred to by her first name to protect her family’s privacy, described the shortage as a “nightmare.”

This year, she said, her 16-year-old son’s extended release generic Focalin became difficult to find. And because they couldn’t get it consistently, his fourth quarter played out like a “roller coaster.”

“One week he will have a 100 in the class and next week multiple zeros,” she said.

Over the summer, Suzana said, he was on and off his medication so they could save his pills for the school year, which began Monday. That meant she would have extra time to find a refill for his medication.

“This morning I actually counted pills to see how many he had left,” she said.

Now that her son has his driver’s license, she plans to limit his driving, but she worries: “If he doesn’t take a dose and he drives — will he be OK?”

Zelensky Called Him a Criminal. Now Ukraine Calls Him for Guns and Ammo.

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In the early weeks of the war in Ukraine, with the invading Russian Army bearing down on Kyiv, the Ukrainian government needed weapons, and quickly. So its Ministry of Defense made a desperate and unlikely phone call.

On the other end of the line was Serhiy Pashinsky, a chain-smoking former lawmaker who had overseen military spending for years. He had spent much of that under investigation on suspicion of corruption or denying accusations of self-dealing. Now, he was living in virtual political exile at his country estate, sidelined by President Volodymyr Zelensky and his promise to root out corruption.

“Go out on the streets and ask whether Pashinsky is a criminal,” Mr. Zelensky said on national television in 2019. “I guarantee you that out of 100 people, 100 will say that he is a criminal.”

But Mr. Pashinsky had ties to the arms business and, perhaps as important, he knew how to operate in a scrum, undaunted by red tape. In government, that had made him the source of scandal. During wartime, it made him invaluable.

He answered the call.

Eighteen months later, a New York Times investigation found, a company tied to Mr. Pashinsky has become the biggest private arms supplier in Ukraine. It buys and sells grenades, artillery shells and rockets through a trans-European network of middlemen. The company, Ukrainian Armored Technology, reported its best year ever last year, with sales totaling more than $350 million, up from $2.8 million the year before the war.

And Mr. Pashinsky is once again under investigation, with the Ukrainian authorities scrutinizing Ukrainian Armored Technology’s pricing and his financial relationships with procurement officials and companies abroad, said two officials familiar with the matter.

This month, investigators with the intelligence service searched the offices of a state-owned company, looking for evidence against Ukrainian Armored Technology, according to government officials with knowledge of the search. Most of those who spoke about the investigation did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing inquiry.

Mr. Pashinsky and the arms network he built highlight a little-discussed aspect of Ukraine’s war strategy. In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past and undone, at least temporarily, years of anticorruption policies. Government officials stopped blacklisting suppliers who had ripped off the military, and they abandoned many public-disclosure rules intended to reveal self-dealing.

Mr. Zelensky’s administration did all of this while promising to continue fighting corruption. That has led to awkward contradictions — like the administration turning for help to someone it had labeled a criminal, gratefully buying weapons and simultaneously investigating him.

In the immediate term, the gamble is paying off. Ukraine held off Russian troops long enough for international aid to arrive. And Ukrainian Armored Technology has tens of millions of dollars in ongoing contracts to support the war effort. The long-term risk is that these temporary changes become entrenched, and that Mr. Pashinsky and others who had been sidelined will emerge from the war with more money and influence than ever.

Ukrainian leaders understand this risk. “We are not very idealistic in this regard,” the deputy defense minister, Volodymyr Havrylov, said in an interview. When the war broke out, he said, “we wanted huge amounts, immediately.”

A Times investigation across Europe shows how that happened, and how Ukraine’s policies, born out of desperation, drove up prices and added layer upon layer of profit-making.

Mr. Pashinsky’s network, for example, buys weapons and then sells them, then buys them again and sells them once more, according to classified contracts and government documents obtained by The Times, along with interviews of more than two dozen current and former government officials and arms-industry figures.

With each transaction, prices rise — as do the profits of Mr. Pashinsky’s associates — until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most. Using multiple brokers in this way may be legal, but it is a time-tested way to inflate profits, and something the Pentagon avoids.

Much of the money that fuels this system comes from European aid, according to an official with knowledge of Ukraine’s wartime funding. But European and American officials are loath to discuss Mr. Pashinsky, for fear of playing into Russia’s narrative that Ukraine’s government is hopelessly corrupt and must be replaced.

Privately, though, they say the re-emergence of figures like Mr. Pashinsky is one reason the American and British governments are buying ammunition for Ukraine rather than simply handing over money.

Mr. Pashinsky, who is the head of the Ukrainian arms industry trade group, denies having any financial interest in the weapons business. On paper, he’s correct. But in Ukraine, documents do not always reflect reality.

Officials from three different parts of Ukraine’s government, including a top arms procurement official, say that when the government wants to buy from Ukrainian Armored Technology, it negotiates with Mr. Pashinsky. “He has always taken care of how that company is organized,” Mr. Havrylov said.

Ukraine’s military relies heavily on Soviet-caliber ammunition, and only so much exists, mostly in former Soviet bloc countries, including some that are reluctant to antagonize Russia by selling to Ukraine. Getting access to that supply requires experienced networks, which Mr. Pashinsky and his team have.

Mr. Pashinsky denied negotiating such deals and chalked up his years of scandals to Russian disinformation campaigns. “I have never been and never will be an embodiment or symbol of a corrupt system,” he said.

He acknowledged the ongoing criminal investigation but said it was motivated by a misguided notion among government officials that arms sellers are making unfairly high profits. He called himself “a responsible citizen of my country who has never betrayed it and will never betray it.”

As for Mr. Zelensky’s televised remarks years back, “The president simply made a mistake,” he said. “He is also a fallible human being.”

Mr. Pashinsky’s detractors say he’s a profiteer. Good-governance groups and political adversaries bemoan his resurgence. But even they are nearly unanimous that today’s weapons-at-any-cost environment is perfect for Mr. Pashinsky.

And he’s delivering.

In 2015, a military procurement official named Nelly Stelmakh was invited to a meeting with Mr. Pashinsky. He was a signature character in politics. He had briefly served as the head of the presidential office — akin to White House chief of staff — and was now the chairman of Parliament’s security and defense committee.

That gave him a central role overseeing weapons purchases at a time when Ukraine was spending heavily to build a military bulwark against Russia.

The meeting invite was a surprise, because Ms. Stelmakh bought nonlethal goods, not weapons. When she arrived at his office, she recalled, Mr. Pashinsky told her to buy fuel from his chosen vendor rather than the lowest bidder.

She was taken aback. “I thought we had to fight our enemies, not steal,” she said in a recent interview. “When I answered I would be working by the law, I started to have problems,” Ms. Stelmakh said. Mr. Pashinsky had government investigators interrogate her, she said.

The government bought the fuel from Mr. Pashinsky’s preferred vendor anyway. He provided The Times with a government letter that said his chosen vendors charged less than earlier ones, but did not address whether other vendors would have cost even less. And although the fuel purchases became a momentary controversy, nothing came of it.

That was often the case with Mr. Pashinsky. Over the years, criminal investigations into his dealings were dismissed. A corruption inquiry into whether he expropriated a candy factory fizzled. Mr. Pashinsky’s son got a job at a state-owned arms buyer, and Ukrainian Armored Technology won government contracts for mortars and armored vehicles, despite having few employees and no manufacturing capability. His family bought a Mercedes and a Range Rover and lived in a 10,000-square-foot home on a walled estate with a lake and a private church.

Endemic corruption was a constant concern for American and European leaders. They wanted to support Ukraine against Russia, but feared throwing money at politicians who treated it as a means of personal profit. The West has long pressured Ukraine to root out corruption, calling it a prerequisite to the country’s joining the NATO military alliance and the European Union.

When the group Transparency International studied Ukraine’s arms-buying system for a 2015 report, investigators viewed Mr. Pashinsky’s competing interests — major arms figure and chairman of the committee overseeing arms deals — as an obstacle to that cleanup, according to someone who worked on that inquiry.

Aivaras Abromavicius, then the head of the country’s largest state-owned arms company and a former government minister, said in a 2019 radio interview that Mr. Pashinsky was an owner of Ukrainian Armored Vehicles. “To be a shadow beneficiary of such powers and to be on the committee is, of course, wrong,” he said.

Mr. Pashinsky, though, was a master of the smoke-filled room, which was often his office, where he smoked Parliament Night Blue cigarettes. He brushed off controversy with counter-accusations or a bit of menacing humor. He got into a fist fight on the floor of Parliament.

He accused members of NAKO, an anticorruption nonprofit group, of being foreign agents, said Olena Tregub, its executive director.

Once, NAKO members gathered in a hearing room to hear Mr. Pashinsky discuss a major military purchase. Sitting at the head of a boardroom table, a Ukrainian flag at his back, Mr. Pashinsky reached forward and placed an explosive shell on the table. “You are lucky that this is fake,” he said with a smile, according to Ms. Tregub, who attended the meeting, and a photograph.

One committee lawyer, Tetiana Blystiv, said in an interview that for years Mr. Pashinsky had ordered her to write official letters to help steer business to companies including Ukrainian Armored Technology. In 2018, when it appeared that Mr. Pashinsky might be voted out of office, she stood up to him and refused.

Mr. Pashinsky summoned her to his office, where he sat, smoking, at his desk. When she arrived, she said, he moved toward her, loudly accusing her of corruption and threatening to have her charged. When he grabbed her arm, she said, she opened the door, hoping he would back down if he saw people in the waiting room.

“Life doesn’t cost much,” she recalled him saying. She said he then made reference to her children.

Ms. Blystiv said she had reported Mr. Pashinsky to the authorities. “They laughed,” she said. “Everyone was on his side.”

In Mr. Pashinsky’s telling, the dispute was actually about his accusation that she had embezzled money. He said he had referred her to prosecutors, and that he never ordered her to write letters to benefit a company. Neither of them has been charged.

Voters ousted Mr. Pashinsky from Parliament in 2019, the same year that Mr. Zelensky rode into office promising to get serious about corruption.

Almost immediately, Mr. Pashinsky’s air of invincibility was gone.

The country’s anticorruption bureau began investigating him on accusations of “abuse of official position,” court records provided by the Ukrainian data company YouControl show. Detectives raided his house at 7 a.m. on Feb. 24, 2020, Mr. Pashinsky wrote on Facebook. The military stopped awarding significant business to Ukrainian Armored Technology, and anticorruption investigators raided its office, confiscating documents and a hard drive.

And soon after the new president came into power, Mr. Pashinsky was arrested over a three-year-old road-rage episode. Mr. Pashinsky had stepped out of his car and fired a gun into the air. When the other driver responded by hitting him in the head with a bottle, he said, “I was forced to shoot him in the leg.” A judge temporarily put him under house arrest in a case that is still pending.

The Pashinsky era, it seemed, was over.

With Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border in January 2022, Mr. Pashinsky saw an opportunity. War seemed imminent, and Ukraine had an arms shortage.

Ukraine had made few major arms purchases in the prior 18 months.

Mr. Zelensky’s policy overhauls had made procurement more transparent, it seemed, but also less effective. The old system was gone, but nobody could figure out a new one.

Mr. Pashinsky began telling military contacts that, if asked, he could supply weapons, government officials said.

That’s when the phone rang and he was invited to a meeting with defense officials, according to four people briefed on it.

Big NATO shipments had yet to begin, and the country desperately needed Soviet-caliber ammunition. The most important supplier, Bulgaria, refused to sell directly to Ukraine for fear of upsetting Russia.

That made Mr. Pashinsky particularly valuable, officials say. Ukrainian Armored Technology had connections in Bulgaria.

Mr. Pashinsky’s contact there was a broker named Kaloyan Stanislavov. The two knew each other through a Lithuanian politician who had been convicted on corruption charges, according to government documents and business associates.

Mr. Stanislavov was able to get Bulgarian factories to prioritize his orders. At one of the biggest manufacturers, an associate said, Mr. Stanislavov bought nearly all of the available gunpowder early last year, leaving competitors scrambling.

Since Bulgaria did not allow ammunition sales directly to Ukraine, Ukrainian Armored Technology made a deal with a 70-year-old Polish middleman, Andrzej Kowalczyk. He got paperwork falsely listing Poland, not Ukraine, as the ultimate buyer, deal documents show.

Records show that weapons went from Bulgarian manufacturers to Mr. Stanislavov; then to the Polish middleman; then to Ukrainian Armored Technology; and finally to Ukraine’s military. Shipping records for one deal show that a Ukrainian airline flew 265,000 pounds of rockets, grenades and shells from Bulgaria to Poland for delivery to Ukraine.

With each step, prices increased, Mr. Stanislavov acknowledged in a brief interview. The Polish middleman, for example, takes a cut. “It has some surplus of profit,” Mr. Stanislavov said. “Of course. Because it’s a company.” Mr. Kowalczyk said his company takes only a small profit on such deals.

These price increases can benefit Ukrainian Armored Technology, because it charges the Ukrainian military fees based on its purchase price.

Ukrainian prosecutors are now investigating this network and whether Mr. Pashinsky got kickbacks from the Polish middleman, according to an official with knowledge of the inquiry. Mr. Pashinsky said that he knew the man, but that they had no financial relationship.

Weeks after the war began, Ukrainian Armored Technology had tens of millions of dollars in government contracts for mortar shells, missiles, rockets and grenades. In March 2022 alone, documents show, Ukraine agreed to pay the company more than $100 million.

For much of last year, Ukrainian Armored Technology delivered more reliably than state-owned companies, a defense ministry audit shows.

Some Ukrainian officials blame the company for driving up prices by bidding against state-owned companies to buy weapons. If so, that is not entirely Mr. Pashinsky’s fault.

Early in the war, the Ukrainian government could have kept its anticorruption rules unchanged and left it to the government to do the purchasing. Instead, officials decided to enlist as many arms brokers as possible and stripped away some disclosure rules.

The goal was to tap as many sources, and remove as many barriers, as possible. The result was a frenzy. “We had cases where two state-owned companies were competing for the same stock,” Mr. Havrylov, the deputy defense minister, recalled.

Thousands of brokers answered the call, Mr. Havrylov said. But few had Mr. Pashinsky’s connections. Only 10 to 15 percent could find the ammunition they promised. Only about half of those delivered, he said.

The most successful brokers, officials found, were steeped in the old ways of doing business. Mr. Pashinsky provided crucial supplies earlier than Ukraine’s allies, Mr. Havrylov said.

And he is adamant that people who delivered in that dire period should not be questioned in retrospect.

“Let’s not touch people for what they’ve done in February, March of 2022,” Mr. Havrylov said. “Even if it looks suspicious.”

Michael Schwirtz, Anatol Magdziarz and Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.

Iced Coffee and Flip-Flops as Europe Broils? Not So Fast, Americans.

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On a scorching June day on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, Chloe Madison and her boyfriend, Colin Pinello, stopped to have lunch in Positano, a glamorous town overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

With their refreshing caprese pasta plates and Aperol spritzes, they had one thought on their minds: ice water. But they knew that asking for it would be too American. While the Europeans around them seemed unfazed by the temperatures, she said, they felt parched.

“Water was something we consistently had to request,” she said, and when they asked for ice it was “just a few cubes.”

Ms. Madison, 27, decided to poke fun at this, posting a TikTok video of the couple fanning themselves with the caption: “fighting the American urge to ask for a cup of ice water in Europe.” (In this, she joined a trend of Americans wanting frosty drinks in tourist hot spots, with some musing on social media if Europeans simply don’t drink water.)

With U.S. tourists returning in high numbers to Europe this summer and heat waves also setting records, American sensibilities about staying cool are butting up against European etiquette and norms. (Some tourists are changing their travel plans because of the heat.) Amid the broader climate change crisis, a penchant for flip-flops, shorts and guzzling ice water may seem trivial, but those differences can be stark.

Savvy travelers seeking to blend in with the locals have increasingly turned to social media, particularly TikTok, for advice and commiseration. Much of the guidance will sound familiar to seasoned travelers.

For example, be careful about small talk and asking personal questions of strangers. Don’t be surprised that many Europeans still smoke in cafes and other public places. Do a little research about local customs and learn some basic conversational phrases in the local language.

There’s also this standard advice for Americans: “Be less loud.”

But the record high temperatures in Europe have led to a new theme in online travel advice.

“I couldn’t help but notice the striking contrast between how Americans and Europeans handle a heat wave,” Ms. Madison observed, saying that Europeans “didn’t appear to rely as heavily on things Americans consider essential.”

The experts agree. For a start, don’t expect a big water pitcher filled with ice cubes the moment you sit down in a restaurant.

“It’s not common at all in Europe,” said Viviane Neri, director of the Institut Villa Pierrefeu, a finishing school in Montreux, Switzerland. “In some places, the restaurants have an obligation to serve tap water, but they charge for it nevertheless, because they say we have to wash the bottle and the glass and everything.”

Nor has the American cold brew fad permeated the continent. If you order iced coffee at a local shop, it’ll look more like a Greek frappé or a caffé freddo. In some places, it’s simply not an option unless there happens to be an American coffee chain.

“Iced coffee in America is a thing, and I’m going to be honest, I love it,” said Ilaria Rondinelli Huey, 30, an Italian TikTok creator who moved to the United States a few years ago. “That’s something that I miss when I am in Italy.”

Ms. Rondinelli Huey suggested having traditional hot coffee for breakfast and then ordering an Aperol spritz at lunch.

Also: “We don’t put ice in our wine.”

Travelers from the United States also shouldn’t expect air-conditioning or other power-hungry conveniences.

Europeans are more concerned about climate change than Americans, surveys have found. That is reflected in the rejection of not only air-conditioning, but also clothes dryers. You may find a clothesline at your rental instead. Energy shortages in recent years have also led to limits on power usage.

Older styles of architecture built to keep people cool have meant that only about one-fifth of European homes have air-conditioning, compared with nine-tenths of American ones.

“You leave the shutters closed when it’s hot. You open them in the morning to let the cool air in,” Ms. Neri said. “And then you put up with a little bit of discomfort, and that’s not the end of the world.”

And when there is A.C., don’t expect anyone to blast it. “Even when it’s on, it’s not ‘United States on,’” said Amanda Rollins, an American TikTok creator who has lived in Paris for six years.

She recently went to a movie theater where she said audience members were fanning themselves, a contrast to the deep freeze typical in American theaters.

And then there is the matter of what to wear. Even with the heat, it might be ill-advised to wear the comfortable shorts, T-shirts and sandals that some people wear to dinner or the theater in the United States.

“Here in Italy, people dress up to take the garbage down the street,” Stefano Lodi, general manager of the Hotel Brunelleschi in Florence, said jokingly. “You wouldn’t dare put on flip-flops.”

Some fashion faux pas are blaring — beachwear on a city street, cutoff shorts and crop tops at a fancy restaurant. And the cost may be more than a dirty look: Upscale restaurants and even bars may turn you away for dressing too casually.

Mr. Lodi said he turns people away from the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant each summer because they arrive in shorts (despite the instructions to the contrary on the reservation confirmation). “They say, ‘It’s very hot; you should have told me,’ and we say: ‘Well, yes, we told you.’”

Other tourist spots, including churches, have dress rules. “No short shorts, no crop tops,” Ms. Rondinelli Huey said. In general, athleisure or sneakers may stick out.

In fashion capitals like Paris, heat doesn’t stand in the way of fashionistas.

“Even when it’s hot out, I’ll see French people wearing a long sleeve or a long dress or a coat,” Ms. Rollins said, adding that she rarely saw Parisians wearing shorts.

That is a contrast to the American style in hot summers: “We’re like as close to naked as we can be,” she said.

Opinion | At a College Targeted by DeSantis, Gender Studies Is Out, Jocks Are In

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As of July, New College had 328 incoming students, a record for the school. Of the group, 115 are athletes, and 70 were recruited to play baseball, even though, as Walker reported, New College has no real sports facilities and has yet to be accepted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. By comparison, the University of Florida’s far more established baseball team has 37 student-athletes.

The accommodations offered to New College’s new student-athletes will be better than those provided to many existing students. Walker reported that the incoming class will be housed in newer, apartment-style dorms that in the past were reserved for upperclass students. Returning students are being moved to older, more decrepit buildings, two of which recently were declared uninhabitable because of a mold problem. (New College has said it won’t put students in mold-affected rooms.)

Some new students may well end up immersing themselves in the great works of the Western canon. But last week, New College’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, a longtime Republican politician who served as DeSantis’s education commissioner, sent a memo to faculty members, proposing new majors in finance, communications and sports psychology, “which will appeal to many of our newly admitted athletes.” As Amy Reid, a New College professor of French who directs the gender studies department, said when I spoke to her last weekend, “Tell me how sports psychology, finance and communications fits with a classical liberal arts model.”

Rather than reviving some traditional model of academic excellence, then, it looks as though New College leaders are simply trying to replace a culture they find politically hostile with one meant to be more congenial. The end of gender studies and the special treatment given to incoming athletes are part of the same project, masculinizing a place that had been heavily feminist, artsy and queer. When I spoke to Rufo last weekend, he offered several explanations for New College’s new emphasis on sports, including the classical idea that a healthy body sustains a healthy mind. But an important part of the investment in athletics, he said, is that it is a way to make New College more male and, by extension, less left wing.

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.

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