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How to Navigate Dubrovnik Without the Crowds

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The Pile and Ploce Gates, the two entrances into Dubrovnik’s Old Town, once had drawbridges that lifted during the overnight hours, forcing visitors wanting to enter to wait outside its stone walls until morning. The bridges no longer lift, yet the bottlenecks of morning visitors remain.

This compact, seaside city in Croatia has drawn millions of travelers from around the globe for years. Its popularity grew when HBO’s “Game of Thrones” used it as a primary location and visitors soon overwhelmed the city, particularly in the summer. Officials have introduced measures to manage the crowds without limiting the number of visitors, but according to the Croatian National Tourist Board, this year is on pace to become the city’s busiest ever.

Yet a trip to “Pearl of the Adriatic” need not require jostling with other tourists, bumping about like a stream of rambunctious salmon. Planning takes artful timing, minor sacrifices and a bit of luck. Here are six ways to start.

Dubrovnik is a mainstay on the itineraries of cruise ships navigating the Mediterranean, and 377,000 passengers disembarked last year, according to the city’s Port Authority. This year that number could jump to 500,000, as up to five ships are expected to arrive daily during the high season.

Every cruise ship’s arrival sends an avalanche of humanity barreling toward Old Town, mostly between 7 and 9 a.m. In this surge, a few hundred to several thousand people congregate at the two gates, waiting in lines of up to two hours to enter the Old Town, and then typically disperse to view the city’s biggest draws — its ramparts, the main street, or Stradun, or scenery related to “Game of Thrones.”

To avoid joining this ebb and flow of cruise ship passengers, monitor the port’s schedule online. The Port Authority’s schedule and sites like Cruise Dig offer cruise ships’ arrival times as well as the potential number of travelers disembarking. The number of passengers arriving is more important than the number of ships.

A two-hour buffer should be enough to avoid the crowd at the gates, the Jesuit Stairs (best known from the “Walk of Shame” scene in “Game of Thrones”) or the city’s other major attractions.

The city also offers Dubrovnik Visitors, an online resource that estimates how crowded the Old Town is at any moment, and also uses machine learning to forecast visitor numbers during future dates.

The city’s streets empty somewhat in the late afternoon. Day-trippers shuffle out while other visitors rush to the city walls for selfies or even the occasional marriage proposal in front of the setting sun. The golden hour is a better time to take in the Old Town, with a stop by Onofrio’s Fountains before getting lost in the narrow passageways and streets.

If you do need a photo you can hashtag, check the passages and stairways below the walls for unique shots; there will be much less jostling for space.

But don’t skip the city’s fortifications entirely. Undulating terra-cotta roofs rippling off into the distant, glistening Adriatic Sea remain a vista unique to Dubrovnik. It is best experienced as soon as the walls open at 8 a.m., before the crowds and before the sun rises high. A visit is 35 euros ($38), but the Dubrovnik Pass, which costs the same, offers access to the city walls as well as discounts to other attractions and free public transport.

One can find respite from the congestion by ducking into one of the city’s two monasteries and their courtyards. Each offers stone walkways lined by arches, with lush greenery at the center and history everywhere. They are open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The 14th-century Franciscan Monastery, just past the Pile Gate, features elegant pillared columns encircling a courtyard with a small fountain and orange and palm trees (entrance: €6). Next door is the oldest operating pharmacy in Europe, with formulas, tools and tincture bottles on display.

The Dominican Monastery, closer to the Ploce Gate, offers a grander version of the same charms, housed within a larger complex blended into the city’s fortifications (€5).

At both monasteries, the atmosphere encourages hushed tones and meditative silence, perhaps good spots to sip water while contemplating Dubrovnik’s knack for simultaneously preserving and commodifying its historic beauty.

Veteran travelers often steal away to the Gruz and Lapad neighborhoods to find better cuisine, easier access to nature and fewer crowds. These neighborhoods are the de facto urban heart of Dubrovnik, where many of the approximately 40,000 locals actually live, and can be reached from the Old Town by a 30-minute walk or a 10-minute bus or cab ride.

The waterfront in Gruz offers relaxing eateries as well as a nightclub, Klub Dubina, and local craft brewery, the Dubrovnik Beer Company. For traditional seafood dishes under a vaulted ceiling, have anything grilled at Glorijet. One of the city’s more inventive vegetarian restaurants, Urban & Veggie, offers homemade gnocchi with cashew Parmesan and refreshing lemon tarts.

Across from Gruz, Lapad’s lush greenery includes the Velika and Mala Petka Forest Park. A promenade along the sea wall reveals several improvised swimming areas and a beach.

The neighborhood eateries here offer variety, experimentation and unique experiences. Ponat Beach Bar has a slick combination of seaside bites and drinks that can stretch your night beyond midnight. Or have a coffee or a nightcap in Cave Bar More — which claustrophobic visitors should probably skip.

What’s the antithesis of Dubrovnik’s imposing city walls and terra-cotta roofs? An island covered in pine, cypress and olive trees, just offshore.

Lokrum Island, a 10-minute ferry ride away, is one of the few spots even locals visit to beat the summer crowds. The island has a visitor center, bars and restaurants, but also botanical gardens and peacocks roaming the remnants of an abandoned medieval monastery.

The more adventurous can head to FKK Rocks, at the island’s southeast corner, to partake in Croatia’s long history of nudist beaches (bring a thick towel — the rocks can be uncomfortable on bare skin).

In the visitor center, one can find a “comfortable” seat on the original Iron Throne from “Game of Thrones,” given by HBO to the city of Dubrovnik.

Ferries leave the Old Town port about every 30 minutes (€7). Entry to the island, €27.

Only 50 of Croatia’s 1,244 islands have permanent residents, leaving most of the truly unspoiled nature offshore. The Elaphiti Islands, six miles northwest of the Old Town, gives visitors and city residents alike a close-up view of nature. The eight islands and five islets include cozy coves and secluded beaches that trump most of the mainland’s swimming options. (In Croatia, the coastline is public access.)

Three of the islands — Sipan, Lopud and Kolocep — have modest villages with few residents. After the bustle of Dubrovnik, time here feels much slower.

Renting a vessel offers the best chance to create a one-day island-hopping itinerary, and most have skippers available for an additional charge. Prices vary, a group of four can expect to pay about €70 per person for a smaller skipper-less motorboat, with costs increasing along with the size of the vessel. Some companies, like Dubrovnik Boats, offer either custom or prepackaged tours, and craft of various sizes.

Kayaks are also available for rent, with most tour outfits located at Sulic Beach, by the Pile Gate. Again, prices vary, depending on whether you’re joining a group tour or going solo, but expect to spend around €40 for about four hours out on the water.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.

Opinion | AI Needs to Progress to Jumpstart Our Economic Productivity

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The workers were furious. Believing that new mechanical looms threatened their jobs, they broke into factories, seized machinery, brought it into the street and set it afire, all with widespread public support, even tacitly from the authorities.

That was in 1675. And those English textile workers were neither first nor last in the long procession of worriers about the potential harm to jobs from labor-saving devices. Several centuries earlier, the adoption of the fulling mill caused an uproar among workers forced to find other occupations. Almost exactly 60 years ago, Life magazine warned that the advent of automation would make “jobs go scarce” — instead, employment boomed.

Now, the launch of ChatGPT and other generative A.I. platforms has unleashed a tsunami of hyperbolic fretting, this time about the fate of white-collar workers. Will paralegals — or maybe even a chunk of lawyers — be rendered superfluous? Will A.I. diagnose some medical conditions faster and better than doctors? Will my next guest essay be ghostwritten by a machine? A breathless press has already begun chronicling the first job losses.

Unlike most past rounds of technological improvement, the advent of A.I. has also birthed a small armada of non-economic fears, from disinformation to privacy to the fate of democracy itself. Some suggest in seriousness that A.I. could have a more devastating impact on humanity than nuclear war.

While acknowledging the need for substantive guardrails, I’ll leave those valid concerns to others. When it comes to the economy, including jobs, the reassuring lessons of history (albeit with a few warning signals) are inescapable. At the moment, the problem is not that we have too much technology; it’s that we have too little.

We’ve had forms of artificial intelligence, broadly defined, for millenniums. The abacus, thought to have been invented in Babylonia more than 4,000 years ago, replaced more laborious methods of mathematical calculation, saving time and therefore reducing work.

When I began my career in finance in the early 1980s, we had only hand-held calculators to help with our numerical analysis, which we painstakingly wrote in pencil on large sheets of paper (hence the term “spreadsheets”) and which were then typed by a secretarial pool. Any changes meant redoing the entire spreadsheet. Now, all that happens with the click of a mouse.

Less than three decades ago, library-type research could require hours of combing through dusty volumes; now, it necessitates a few strokes on a keyboard. Not surprisingly, the number of librarians has been flat since 1990, while total employment has grown by more than 40 percent.

Other job categories have almost completely disappeared. When was the last time you talked to a telephone operator? Or were conveyed by a manned elevator? In the place of these and so many other defunct tasks, a vast array of new categories has been created. A recent study co-authored by M.I.T. economist David Autor found that approximately 60 percent of jobs in 2018 were in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940.

And so the Great American Jobs Machine ground on. In the decade after Life magazine decried the robot invasion, the United States created 20.2 million jobs, and today, the unemployment rate sits at 3.6 percent, a hair above its 50-year low. Of course, the number of Americans employed in finance has boomed, even as computers, Excel and other technologies have made them far more productive.

Higher worker productivity translates into higher wages and cheaper goods, which become more purchasing power, which stimulates more consumption, which induces more production, which creates new jobs. That, essentially, is how growth has always happened.

This makes A.I. a must-have, not just a nice-to-have. We can only achieve lasting economic progress and rising standards of living by increasing how much each worker produces. Technology — whether in the form of looms or robots or artificial intelligence — is central to that objective.

Generative A.I. — as dazzling and scary as it can be because of its potential to be a particularly transformative innovation — is just another step in the continuum of progress. Were our ancestors any less startled when they first witnessed other exceptional inventions, like a telephone transmitting voice or a light bulb illuminating a room?

In the heyday of commercial innovation — between 1920 and 1970 — productivity rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate. Since then, except for a brief interval of acceleration between 1995 and 2005 (the modern computer revolution), the annual rate of growth has averaged a modest 1.6 percent. To pessimists, that reflects their view that the most impactful technological advances are behind us. To me, that means full speed ahead on A.I.

What constitutes “full speed ahead” remains to be seen. For all those who believe that A.I. will prove revolutionary, there are others more skeptical that it will prove a game changer. My best guess is that it will help nudge productivity upward but not back to its halcyon days of the last century.

To be sure, the benefits of productivity growth don’t always reach workers as fully and efficiently as we’d like. Recently, even the meager productivity growth has largely not filtered down to the workers. Since 1990, labor efficiency has risen by 84 percent, but average real (adjusted for inflation) hourly compensation has increased by 56 percent.

That foregone worker compensation has largely gone into corporate profits, fueling a stock market boom and record income inequality. Why the disconnect? There are a variety of contributors, from declining union membership to imports to anti-labor practices by companies, like noncompete clauses for hourly workers.

Government can help ameliorate these dislocations. For more than a century, redistribution — yes, that can be a dirty word in America — has been a necessary part of managing the fruits of the industrial and technological improvements.

The progressive income tax, introduced in 1913, was designed, in part, to offset the vast income inequality generated during the Gilded Age. More factory improvements and more income inequality in the 1920s helped stimulate a variety of New Deal policies, from additional protection for labor to the introduction of Social Security.

Today, we can easily see the consequences of Washington’s failure to hold up its end of the bargain. Disgruntled white factory workers in the Midwest with stagnant or falling real wages became supporters of Donald Trump (despite the fact that his policies favored the wealthy). With only 22 percent of Americans saying our country is on the right track, America feels more divided politically and socially than at any time in my 70-year lifetime.

We did a lousy job of preparing Americans for the transition from a manufacturing economy to one dominated by services. We have to do a better job this time.

If artificial intelligence proves as transformative as its acolytes (and some antagonists) believe, we could face a vast need for better education and training. The impact will not be just on factory workers but on Americans across industries and up and down the employment chain, from financial analysts and coders to graphic designers and customer service agents and call-center workers.

A recent report from Goldman Sachs, among the most bullish of the techno-bulls, concluded that A.I. can help return our productivity growth rate to the halcyon days of the mid-20th century. I, for one, am fervently hoping that the Goldman report proves correct and that A.I. unleashes a new era of technological and economic progress — and that we take the right steps to be sure the rewards are widely shared.

Russia-Ukraine Live Updates: Putin Held Meeting With Prigozhin, Kremlin Says

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ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said on Monday that the European Union should open the way for Turkey to join the bloc before Turkey allows Sweden to join NATO, adding a surprising new condition that could further stall the military alliance’s efforts to expand.

Mr. Erdogan’s latest demand came a day before the opening of NATO’s two-day annual summit, where leaders, including President Biden, had hoped to secure unanimous approval from member states to allow Sweden to become the 32nd member.

That outcome now appears increasingly unlikely, with Mr. Erdogan posing the main obstacle to Sweden’s membership.

“First, clear the way for Turkey in the European Union, then we will clear the way for Sweden as we did for Finland,” Mr. Erdogan told reporters before traveling to the NATO summit.

Leaders of the European Union and NATO member states are not likely to respond positively, since they are separate organizations that have many overlapping members but entirely different purposes. Turkey applied to join the European Union in 1987, but there has been scarcely any progress in its bid since 2016, when the European Parliament voted to suspend accession talks while criticizing a vast Turkish government crackdown on political opponents after a failed coup against Mr. Erdogan.

NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Monday that he supports Turkey’s ambition to join the European Union, but that it was not among the conditions set by officials from Turkey, Sweden and Finland last year at a NATO summit in Madrid.

“We need to remember that what we agreed in Madrid was a specific list of conditions that Sweden has to meet to be a full member of the alliance, and Sweden has met these conditions,” Mr. Stoltenberg told reporters in Lithuania.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, which is a member of both the European Union and NATO, said that the two issues should not be linked.

“Sweden meets all the requirements for NATO membership,” Mr. Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is unrelated, and so I don’t think it should be taken as a related issue.”

Sweden applied to join NATO last year, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. All NATO nations must agree to admit new members, a rule that has given Mr. Erdogan tremendous leverage to demand concessions.

Turkey has accused Sweden of providing a permissive environment for dissidents whom Turkey considers terrorists, including pro-Kurdish activists and members of a religious group that Turkey has accused of planning the 2016 coup attempt.

In recent months, Sweden has made efforts to meet Turkey’s demands, amending its Constitution, passing new counterterrorism legislation and agreeing to extradite several Turks who stand accused of crimes in Turkey. But Swedish courts have blocked other extraditions, and Swedish officials have said that they cannot override their country’s free-speech protections.

Mr. Erdogan has continued to say that Sweden must do more.

A new complication arose late last month after a man publicly burned a Quran at a protest in Stockholm on a major Muslim holiday. Mr. Erdogan criticized Sweden for permitting the protest and said that the Swedish authorities needed to fight Islamophobia, even though that had not been among the issues Sweden had agreed with Turkey to address.

Hungary is the only other NATO member that has yet to approve Sweden’s bid, but Hungarian officials have said that if Turkey’s position changes, they would not obstruct the process. Finland applied at the same time as Sweden, but overcame Turkey’s initial objections and joined the alliance in April.

By linking Turkey’s drive to join the European Union with Sweden’s joining NATO, Mr. Erdogan threw another wrench into the alliance’s negotiations less than 24 hours before NATO leaders are expected to convene in Vilnius, Lithuania, for their annual summit. On Sunday, President Biden spoke with Mr. Erdogan and told him of “his desire to welcome Sweden into NATO as soon as possible,” according to a terse account of the call provided by the White House.

Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the United States continues to support Turkey’s aspirations to join the European Union, adding that the bid was a matter between those parties.

“Our focus is on Sweden, which is ready to join the NATO alliance,” he said.

Before traveling to the summit, Mr. Erdogan said again on Monday that Sweden could not expect to join until it had met all of Turkey’s demands with respect to terrorism.

“Nobody should expect compromise nor understanding from me,” he said.

Gulsin Harman and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

Hunter Biden prosecutor says Justice Dept didn’t interfere in probe

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By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The federal prosecutor overseeing the criminal case against U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on Monday said the Justice Department never impeded him from bringing charges, appearing to debunk claims made by an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower.

Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss in a letter to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham denied allegations that he ever formally sought permission from Attorney General Merrick Garland to be designated as special counsel – a status that would have allowed him to bring federal charges in any district across the nation against Hunter Biden.

“I have not requested Special Counsel designation,” wrote Weiss, who was appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump.

“Rather, I had discussions with Departmental officials regarding potential appointment … which would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney. I was assured that I would be granted this authority if it proved necessary.”

Weiss’ office last month revealed that it was charging Hunter Biden with two misdemeanor tax charges, to which the president’s son is expected to plead guilty later this month. Hunter Biden also has agreed to enter into a pretrial diversion program to avoid facing a more serious felony count of possessing a firearm while he was using illegal drugs.

Republicans have questioned why Weiss did not bring more aggressive felony charges.

Their criticism has been fueled in part by claims from Gary Shapley, an IRS criminal supervisory agent who worked on the Hunter Biden investigation.

Shapley in an interview with lawmakers claimed that the Justice Department repeatedly stonewalled the probe, starting during the Trump administration and continuing through to the present.

Most notably, Shapley said investigators uncovered evidence of more serious tax crimes that could only be pursued in either Washington, D.C., or California, but not in Delaware.

Shapley said that when Weiss sought permission from Garland to be designated as special counsel, so he could bring charges from anywhere in the country, his request was denied.

Garland has denied the claim, telling reporters last month that Weiss made no such request and stating that Weiss was given “complete authority.”

Hunter Biden’s attorney has also denied that his client received any special treatment.

Weiss, in his letter on Monday, confirmed Garland’s prior comments on the case, telling lawmakers he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.”

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Graff)

The New York Times to Disband Its Sports Department

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The New York Times said on Monday that it would disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.

Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, announced the change to the newsroom as “an evolution in how we cover sports.”

“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of the Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism. The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.

The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.

The staff of The Athletic will now provide the bulk of the coverage of sporting events, athletes and leagues for Times readers and, for the first time, articles from The Athletic will appear in The Times’s print newspaper. Online access to The Athletic, which is operated separately from the Times newsroom, is included for those who subscribe to two or more of The Times’s bundle of products.

Journalists on the sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom and no layoffs were planned, Mr. Kahn and Ms. Drake said. A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections. The moves are expected to be completed by the fall.

When The Times bought The Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company appeal to a broader audience. They added it to a subscription bundle that includes the main Times news site as well as Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service and Games.

As a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.

Last November, The Times named Steven Ginsberg, a top editor at The Washington Post, the executive editor of The Athletic. In June, The Athletic laid off nearly 20 reporters and moved more than 20 others to new jobs. Its leaders said the outlet would no longer assign at least one beat reporter to each sports team.

The acquisition of The Athletic had raised questions about the future of The Times’s sports department, which has included numerous distinguished journalists. The Sports of the Times column was started by John Kieran in 1927, and would later include a distinguished group of writers, including Robert Lipsyte, William Rhoden, Harvey Araton, George Vecsey and Ira Berkow.

Three Sports of the Times columnists, Arthur Daley, Red Smith and Dave Anderson, have won Pulitzer Prizes for their sports writing. Mr. Daley wrote more than 10,000 columns for The Times over 32 years. (Another sports reporter, John Branch, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his feature on a deadly avalanche in Washington State and Josh Haner won the feature photography prize in 2014 for documenting the recovery of a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.)

In recent years, with the rise of digital media, The Times’s sports department began to downsize, just as many other national and local newspapers did. The section lost its stand-alone daily print section. Not every local team was assigned a beat reporter. Box scores disappeared.

On Sunday, a group of nearly 30 members of The Times’s sports desk sent a letter to Mr. Kahn and A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, chastising the company for leaving its sports staff “twisting in the wind” since the purchase of The Athletic.

Mr. Sulzberger and the company’s chief executive, Meredith Kopit Levien, wrote in an email to the staff on Monday that the company’s goal since acquiring The Athletic was to become “a global leader in sports journalism.”

An Art-Filled Swiss Idyll in Lausanne and the Joux Valley

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The museum has a collection of more than 10,000 pieces, dating from 1816. Many are by Swiss artists, including the Giacomettis, father and son. When I visited, one floor featured a large, temporary exhibition of more than 100 paintings by the Swiss painter Gustav Buchet, an important figure in the avant-garde movements in early-20th-century Switzerland. I was captivated, though, by the more realist paintings of François Bocion, who frequently painted working boatmen along Lake Geneva in the 19th century. Bocion was obsessed with capturing the elusive beauty of light on water, and his obsession is our reward.

The museum isn’t strictly parochial, though. It also owns and displays boldface names, too: Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and Rodin, and there is an exhibition by a pioneer of textile art, Magdalena Abakanowicz, through late September.

The newest addition to Plateforme 10 caps the far end of the plaza: an enormous white cube, its only windows appearing where the cube seems to fracture. The building was designed by the Portuguese architects Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus and opened in June 2022, along with the plaza. The cube houses the quarter’s two other museums, the Photo Elysée, the canton’s museum dedicated to photography; and Mudac, its museum of design and contemporary applied arts.

Inside, the ground level of this enormous block manages both a solidity and a tent-like airiness. Downstairs, an interactive photography studio was the best of museum education: Visitors can dress up with props, take digital photos and then edit them on a light table — all to teach concepts of framing and composition.

The photo exhibitions were at their best in the Elysée’s contribution to a districtwide exhibition on trains in art, showing photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Nan Goldin and others. Many photos reminded how trains can represent escape and adventure, but also a Hail Mary for the desperate. Black-and-white shots of war refugees piling onto trains, taken 70 years ago, felt like they could have been taken last month.

F1: British Grand Prix Time, TV, Results

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Lando Norris took the lead early and then he took the fight right to Max Verstappen. But a British Grand Prix that offered some early drama at Silverstone on Sunday eventually ended in the most predictable way possible: with Verstappen taking the lead back, pushing his Red Bull far out in front, and leaving everyone else racing for second place.

Verstappen earned his sixth straight victory, his eighth win of the season and his first at the British Grand Prix with yet another dominant day. The victory extended Red Bull’s record to perfect 10 wins in 10 races this season, and — combined with a win on the final day of last season — let the team equal McLaren’s Formula 1 record of 11 wins in a row, set in 1988.

But it was Norris, in a McLaren, who felt like the day’s biggest winner after holding off Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes in an all-British battle for second place.

Norris’s result was the first podium finish for McLaren this season, and a welcome reward for his impressive performance holding off Hamilton, a seven-time world champion, in the final laps.

Hamilton tried everything to get around the 23-year-old Norris as the laps fell away. Feints inside. Sweeping turns out wide. Close-quarters maneuvering. But none of Hamilton’s experience or his skills could get him around a remarkable defensive drive by Norris. It was the first time two British drivers had stood on the podium at Silverstone since 1999. McLaren’s second car, driven by Oscar Piastri, was right behind in fourth place.

The most intriguing driver at Silverstone, the one teams and fans alike wanted to get a look at all week, was a fictional one: Sonny Hayes.

That’s the name of the character the actor Brad Pitt will play in a new Formula 1 film that spent the week shooting scenes and meeting people at the track — even setting up a fake garage and a fake hospitality trailer — as part of an effort at gathering intelligence, advice and race footage.

Teams seemed eager to get close to the project. Lewis Hamilton is part of the film’s production apparatus, Red Bull’s Christian Horner met with the filmmakers on Friday, and Mercedes even helped with the design of the cars of Pitt’s fictional Apex racing team.

“We’ve been involved pretty early,” Toto Wolff of Mercedes told reporters last week. “When we had the first discussions, we sent Brad to a driving school in France, going through the Formula cars from Formula 4 all the way up, and we tried to be helpful with the narrative. Lewis is an executive producer, so he wanted to make sure when the movie comes out, it’s as realistic as possible.”

Pitt and his co-star, Damson Idris, were around the grid all week, and several windows were carved out of the tight racing schedule to allow for filming on the track itself.

  • “I did what I could. I brought the fight to Max for as long as possible.” — Norris, on taking the lead at the start before surrendering it and focusing his efforts on protecting second place.

  • “We had a terrible start so we need to look into why that was.” — Verstappen, unwilling to be looking at the back of another car for even a single lap.

  • “That’s where I started, so to see them back on top warms my heart.” — Lewis Hamilton, a former McLaren driver, on seeing his old team on the podium.

Verstappen’s lead over his teammate Sergio Pérez, who rallied from another poor Saturday (he qualified in 15th) with another strong Sunday (he finished sixth), is now 99 points.

It also ensured that Verstappen would carry his points lead into September even if he stops showing up at races. (Spoiler: He will show up at all the races.)

The Elite Circle Clarence Thomas Entered That Led to the Supreme Court

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“David and Peggy Sokol hosted us in Montana for a ranch visit and tour of Yellowstone,” the Thomases said in the letter, which was reviewed by The Times. The Thomases brought along their dog, Petey, who played with the Sokols’ dog, Bodie. They wrote: “Bodie showed Petey how to be a ranch dog, without a leash! LIBERTY!” Supreme Court

The trip, they concluded, was “pure heaven for all of us!”

The Clarence Thomas origin story begins in a dirt-floor shack in Pin Point, a tiny community founded by formerly enslaved people in the salt marsh lands outside Savannah.

When he is 20, after a brief spell in a Roman Catholic seminary, it continues at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he is one of a small group of young Black men who integrate the school. There, in the spring of 1971, his senior year, he receives a letter from Yale Law School. He worries that the thin envelope means a rejection. But one of the nation’s most elite law schools wants him.

“My heart raced and my spirits lifted,” Justice Thomas wrote in his autobiography.

At Yale, he was one of only 12 Black students in his law school class, admitted the year the law school introduced an affirmative action plan. His white classmates viewed him as a token, he felt — a belief in the corrosive effects of affirmative action that was only deepened by his failure to win the law firm job he had dreamed of.

“I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value,” he later wrote. Separately, he described leaving Yale as a new father, with a “swirling combination of frustration, of some disappointments, of some anxiety about the future, and some anxiety about how I would repay my student loans, how I would feed a young child, where I would live.”

Investigation Uncovers More of Clarence Thomas’ Undisclosed Freebies from Wealthy Pals

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Clarence Thomas’ connections to wealth and expensive vacations run deeper than billionaire businessman and Nazi-enthusiast Harlan Crow. The New York Times reports that Thomas has milked relationships with the rich he made through the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a scholarship association, to benefit himself and his wife.

Because of their Horatio Alger connections, Thomas and his spouse, Virginia, have been invited to join luxurious vacations and parties in addition being granted V.I.P. access to sports events. Thanks to the association, Thomas also rubbed elbows with the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon during a lavish three-day Montana birthday party for billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington.

But the connections Thomas made through Horatio Alger have benefitted him beyond lavish trips. Thomas’ Horatio Alger contacts — including Washington as well as investor David Sokol, formerly of Berkshire Hathaway — helped fund a documentary that painted him in a heroic light after the premier of an HBO movie that depicted Anita Hill during his confirmation hearings making sexual harassment allegations against Thomas. The Sokol family also hosted Thomas and his wife at their Montana ranch and their waterfront Florida estate. According to the Times, Thomas has not reported many of the benefits and gifts he has received from his rich and well-connected allies. The justice also declined to answer questions from the paper about the matter.

Early in his SCOTUS tenure, Thomas did report a number of personal gifts he received, including flights on private planes, cigars, and clothing. But after 2004, when The Los Angeles Times reported on his disclosures, Thomas ceased reporting to the court certain gifts and benefits he received. A ProPublica investigation in 2023 uncovered the justice’s close relationship with Crow, a GOP megadonor with a large collection of Nazi memorabilia and Hitler paintings, including trips on Crow’s private jet and yacht totaling tens of thousands and Crow’s purchase of the house where Thomas’ mother lived. Crow even paid tuition for Thomas’ nephew, who the Thomases were raising. After his relationship with Crow came to light, Thomas justified his lack of disclosures, claiming that “colleagues and others in the judiciary” advised him he did not need to report trips of “personal hospitality” from friends.

Thomas has not only accepted benefits that granted him access to places he otherwise may not have gone, he also hosts the Horatio Alger Association’s induction ceremony for new members in the Supreme Court’s courtroom, which the Times notes is “unusual access” for an outside group. The association has parlayed the access Thomas gives them to fundraise for scholarships and events, per fundraising records reviewed by the Times.

The court this year updated its disclosure rules to mandate justices report private jet travel and comped stays at hotels and resorts, but there is an exception for “personal hospitality,” meaning food, accommodations, or entertainment that is not related to business.

“The Horatio Alger Association has been a home to Virginia and me,” Thomas said when he received the association’s highest honor in 2010, adding that the association “has allowed me to see my dreams come true.”

If his dreams were of undisclosed fancy vacations and V.I.P. access, then that’s probably the case.

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Substance Abuse Is Climbing Among Seniors

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When Dr. Benjamin Han, a geriatrician and addiction medicine specialist, meets new patients at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, he talks with them about the usual health issues that older adults face: chronic conditions, functional ability, medications and how they’re working.

He asks, too, about their use of tobacco, alcohol, cannabis and other nonprescription drugs. “Patients tend to not want to disclose this, but I put it in a health context,” Dr. Han said.

He tells them, “As you get older, there are physiological changes and your brain becomes much more sensitive. Your tolerance goes down as your body changes. It can put you at risk.”

That’s how he learns that someone complaining about insomnia might be using stimulants, possibly methamphetamines, to get going in the morning. Or that a patient who has long taken an opioid for chronic pain has run into trouble with an added prescription for, say, gabapentin.

When one 90-year-old patient, a woman fit enough to take the subway to his previous hospital in New York City, began reporting dizziness and falls, it took Dr. Han a while to understand why: She washed down her prescribed pills, an increasing number as she aged, with a shot of brandy.

He has had older patients whose heart problems, liver disease and cognitive impairment were most likely exacerbated by substance use. Some have overdosed. Despite his best efforts, some have died.

Until a few years ago, even as the opioid epidemic raged, health providers and researchers paid limited attention to drug use by older adults; concerns focused on the younger, working-age victims who were hardest hit.

But as baby boomers have turned 65, the age at which they typically qualify for Medicare, substance use disorders among the older population have climbed steeply. “Cohorts have habits around drug and alcohol use that they carry through life,” said Keith Humphreys, a psychologist and addiction researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Aging boomers “still use drugs far more than their parents did, and the field wasn’t ready for that.”

Evidence of a growing problem has been stacking up. A study of opioid use disorder in people over 65 enrolled in traditional Medicare, for instance, showed a threefold increase in just five years — to 15.7 cases per 1,000 in 2018 from 4.6 cases per 1,000 in 2013.

Tse-Chuan Yang, a co-author of the study and a sociologist and demographer at the University at Albany, said the stigma of drug use may lead people to underreport it, so the true rate of the disorder may be higher still.

Fatal overdoses have also soared among seniors. From 2002 to 2021, the rate of overdose deaths quadrupled to 12 from 3 per 100,000, Dr. Humphreys and Chelsea Shover, a co-author, reported in JAMA Psychiatry in March, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those deaths were both intentional, like suicides, and accidental, reflecting drug interactions and errors.

Most substance use disorders among older people involve prescribed medications, not illegal drugs. And since most Medicare beneficiaries take multiple drugs, “it’s easy to get confused,” Dr. Humphreys said. “The more complicated the regimen, the easier to make mistakes. And then you have an overdose.”

The numbers so far remain comparatively low — 6,700 drug overdose deaths in 2021 among people 65 and older — but the rate of increase is alarming.

“In 1998, that’s what people would have said about overdose deaths in general — the absolute number was small,” Dr. Humphreys said. “When you don’t respond, you end up in a sorrowful state.” More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year.

Alcohol also plays a major role. Last year, a study of substance use disorders, based on a federal survey, analyzed which drugs older Americans were using, looking at the differences between Medicare enrollees under 65 (who may qualify because of disabilities) and those 65 and older.

Of the 2 percent of beneficiaries over 65 who reported a substance use disorder or dependence in the past year — which amounts to more than 900,000 seniors nationwide — more than 87 percent abused alcohol. (Alcohol accounted for 11,616 deaths among seniors in 2020, an 18 percent increase over the previous year.)

In addition, about 8.6 percent of disorders involved opioids, mostly prescription pain relievers; 4.3 percent involved marijuana; and 2 percent involved non-opioid prescription drugs, including tranquilizers and anti-anxiety medications. The categories overlap, because “people often use multiple substances,” said William Parish, the lead author and a health economist at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute.

Although most people with substance use problems don’t die from overdoses, the health consequences can be severe: injuries from falls and accidents, accelerated cognitive decline, cancers, heart and liver disease and kidney failure.

“It’s particularly heartbreaking to compare rates of suicidal ideation,” Dr. Parish said. Older Medicare beneficiaries with substance use disorders were more than three times as likely to report “serious psychological distress” as those without such disorders — 14 percent versus 4 percent. About 7 percent had suicidal thoughts, compared with 2 percent who didn’t report substance disorders.

Yet very few of these seniors underwent treatment in the past year — just 6 percent, compared with 17 percent of younger Medicare beneficiaries — or even made an effort to seek treatment.

“With these addictions, it takes a lot to get somebody ready to get into treatment,” Dr. Parish said, noting that almost half of the respondents over 65 said they lacked the motivation to begin.

But they also face more barriers than younger people. “We see higher rates of stigma concerns, things like worrying about what their neighbors would think,” Dr. Parish said. “We see more logistical barriers,” he said, such as finding transportation, not knowing where to go for help and being unable to afford care.

It may be “harder for older adults to try to navigate the treatment system,” Dr. Parish said.

Uneven Medicare coverage also presents obstacles. Federal parity legislation, mandating the same coverage for mental health (including addiction treatment) and physical health, guarantees equal benefits in private employer insurance, state health exchanges, Affordable Care Act marketplaces and most Medicaid plans.

But it has never included Medicare, said Deborah Steinberg, senior health policy attorney at the Legal Action Center, a nonprofit working to expand equitable coverage.

Advocates have made some inroads. Medicare covers substance use screening and, since 2020, opioid treatment programs like methadone clinics. In January, following congressional action, it will cover treatment by a broader range of health professionals and cover “intensive outpatient treatment,” which typically provides nine to 19 hours of weekly counseling and education. Expanded telehealth benefits, prompted by the pandemic, have also helped.

But more intensive treatment can be hard to access, and residential treatment isn’t covered at all. Medicare Advantage plans, with their more limited provider networks and prior authorization requirements, are even more restrictive. “We see many more complaints from Medicare Advantage beneficiaries,” Ms. Steinberg said.

“We’re actually making progress,” she added. “But people are overdosing and dying because of lack of access to treatment.” Their doctors, unaccustomed to diagnosing substance abuse in older people, may also overlook the risks.

In an age cohort whose youthful drinking and drug use have sometimes provided amusing anecdotes (a common refrain: “If you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there”), it can be difficult for people to recognize how vulnerable they have become.

“That person may not be able to say, I’m addicted,” Dr. Humphreys said. “It’s a Rubicon people don’t want to cross.”

A joke about dropping acid at Woodstock “makes me colorful,” he added. “Crushing OxyContin and snorting it is not colorful.”

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