Producer Claims Al Roker’s Company Fired Him for Supporting Black Staff

A Taliban-run tourism and hotel management institute has opened its doors to students in an effort to attract more tourists to Afghanistan, officials say.

Former NFL quarterback Johnny Manziel and model Josie Canseco appeared to make their relationship Instagram official at Stagecoach this week.

Since the onset of the war with Russia in 2022, approximately 30 Ukrainian men have lost their lives while attempting to flee Ukraine to avoid military service.

The "Funny Girl" star, 82, ultimately deleted the comment after she internet trolls called her out for acting like an "elderly mom."

Pro-Palestinian protesters at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina are being detained by police after the university sent them a demand to vacate their encampment. CNN affiliate WRAL reports.

Ex-intelligence chief Aleksandar Vulin, who is thought to have close ties with Russia, will be one of several vice-premieres in Serbia's new government.

Britain's monarch, King Charles III, had put his official public duties on hold for weeks as he undergoes treatment for an unspecified cancer.

Mississippi legislators are set to vote on a Medicaid expansion plan this week would require new program recipients to be employed at least 100 hours a month.

Caitlin Ochs/ReutersLast Thursday, Donald Trump stood in the hallway of a Manhattan courtroom, where he is on trial for falsifying his business records, and once again attempted to rewrite history. Comparing the antiwar protests now spreading across college campuses to the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, Trump claimed Charlottesville was “nothing...[like] the kind of hate that you have here.” The night before, Trump had written on Truth Social, “Charlottesville is like a peanut compared to the riots and anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our country.”Meanwhile, Trump has been echoed by a chorus of politicians, including Democrats like Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who tweeted, “Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students,” and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who opined that, “I know the people saying this aren't, you know, white Aryan males with tiki torches, but they have the same message.”From the standpoint of those who lived through these events, the comparison is not only unwarranted. It is not only unreasonable. It is, ultimately, unconscionable.Read more at The Daily Beast.

This is who the Knicks are. They can adapt to the unadaptable, adjust to the unadjustable, turn even the most impossible scenarios into something that seems possible.

Too many leaders are failing to uphold the First Amendment rights they claim to champion.

The South Dakota governor continues to face criticism over a story about killing her farm dog, Cricket.

For the 13th time in 14 seasons, the Lakers have fallen far short in their bid to win another NBA title.

Social media footage appeared to show the attacker in question dressed in a yellow sweater, walking and appearing to hide behind garden bushes while carrying a long knife.

Some 43 percent of small business owners were unable to pay rent in full and on time in April, according to a recent report.

Several House Democrats filed a lawsuit accusing the former president of violating the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.

Sergey Smolentsev/ReutersAt least five people have died after a Russian missile attack hit an ornate mansion in Ukraine affectionately known to locals as the “Harry Potter Castle,” officials said Tuesday.Ukraine’s State Emergency Service shared a video showing the building in a seafront park in the southern city of Odesa engulfed in flames after the strike Monday. The agency initially said four people had been killed and another 32 injured, including two children.On Tuesday, regional governor Oleh Kiper said another man had died in the hospital. He added that eight people are still in serious condition and that four of those are in an “extremely serious condition, including a four-year-old girl.” He also said that a day of mourning had been declared throughout the Odesa region.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Suzanne Plunkett/ReutersKing Charles III looked cheerful and happy Tuesday, as he carried out his first official public engagement since being diagnosed with cancer.He was accompanied by his wife, Queen Camilla, as he visited a cancer treatment center in London, England.The royal couple arrived at University College Hospital Macmillan Cancer Centre shortly after 11 a.m. in the state Bentley, a ceremonial vehicle fitted with extra large windows that Charles has been using while traveling in London on state and personal business in recent months to make sure he can be easily seen and photographed.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Connor Lodge thought his daughter Calla would cuddle or give him one of her "big, cheesy grins" but she had other ideas.

Gov. Greg Abbott issued a letter on Monday informing President Biden's administration that Texas will not be adopting the new Title IX protections for "gender identity" published earlier this month.

"This question is actually crazy," wrote one social media user.

Protesters had occupied a building for over a week, leading the university to shut down the campus.

A Middle East expert told Newsweek that China is supplying military equipment to traditional U.S. partners in the region with "no strings attached."

A Columbia University facilities worker claims he was held hostage by anti-Israel protesters after a mob of anarchists stormed Hamilton Hall Tuesday morning.

Israel claims evacuations have begun in Rafah ahead of a planned operation in the Gazan city.

Yellowstone National Park officials say a tourist from Idaho is facing charges after allegedly kicking a bison in the leg and injuring himself in the process.

With a new wave of bird flu affecting hens, egg prices are ticking up again. | Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images How corporate greed plays a role in making bird flu outbreaks — and egg prices — worse. Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu. At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing. The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared. While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average. The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration. The egg market is dominated by some major players The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease. Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms. The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease. When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs. Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive. And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins. “It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch. Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent. Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers. Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs? Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry. During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply. Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf. Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively. The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating. “We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

When you realize the value of a second, you'll find time-savings everywhere.

A massive group of anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University escalated their demonstrations on Tuesday when they took over the iconic Hamilton Hall.

The health challenges facing the royals have "forced them to really think about what matters," a British news show has heard.

When I got pregnant last year, I began reading online about parenting and found myself confronted with an overwhelming quantity of choices. On social media, how-to graphics and videos abound, as do doctrines about the one true way to discipline your children, or feed them, or get them to sleep through the night. Parent forums, blogs, and product-recommendation sites are full of suggestions for the only swaddle that works, the formula that tastes milkiest, the clicking animatronic crab that will get your tummy-time-averse baby to hold her head high. Scrolling through all of this advice can make it seem as though parenting is largely about informed, research-based decision-making—that choosing the right gadgets and the right philosophy will help parenting itself go right.This logic can feel particularly visceral for a parent considering how to be a good steward of the environment. (Do I genuinely need a special $160 blender to avoid giving my baby prepackaged food? Or can I just mash steamed veggies with a fork?) Worrying about waste can turn into a variation on the pursuit of perfect parenting—but not worrying about it is illogical. Our children will inherit the climate crisis. Personal decisions cannot undo that fact; can, indeed, hardly mitigate it. Deciding to be a parent anyway means you had better hope that our species and societies can work out a new way to thrive on a changing, warming, conflict-riddled planet—because if not, what have you done?Choice, the Booker Prize–nominated writer Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, addresses this question head-on. It’s a triptych novel in the vein of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, which use their three parts to repeatedly surprise and challenge readers. Compared with these novels, Choice is both more ambitious and less successful, harmed by the fact that its second and third sections just cannot compete with its blistering first.But that first section is a barn burner. Mukherjee starts Choice with the story of Ayush, an editor at a prestigious London publishing house, whose obsession with the climate crisis lands somewhere between religious fervor and emotional disorder—especially as far as his kids are concerned. Ayush and his economist husband, Luke, have twin children, Masha and Sasha, and his portion of Choice is a beautiful, horrifying, detailed, and messy evocation of parenthood, full of diapers and dirty dishes and “Can you help Daddy make dinner?” It also presents having children as a moral crisis, a stumbling block Ayush can’t get past. He tries bitterly to lessen his family’s consumption—we see him measuring the exact amount of water in which to cook the twins’ pasta, boiling it in the electric kettle because he’s read that it uses less energy than a stovetop pot —but he can’t get away from the belief that Masha and Sasha are “not going to have a future anyway.” His conviction that they’re doomed weighs more and more heavily on his parenting decisions, eventually convincing him that he can no longer parent at all.Readers meet Ayush in a scene nearly too painful to read. Home alone with his kindergarten-age twins, Ayush skips their bedtime story in favor of a documentary about an abattoir. Mukherjee describes this moment in vivid visual detail, contrasting the children’s sweet bedroom decor (cherries on the bedding; sea creatures on the night-light) to the laptop screen, which shows slaughtered pigs on a floor “so caked with layers of old solidified blood and fresh new infusion that it looks like a large wedge of fudgy chocolate cake.” Unsurprisingly, the twins sob hysterically as the video plays; their distress upsets Ayush so acutely that he cannot talk. But rather than comfort them once he regains speech, he doubles down on the decision that he has to teach them about cruelty to animals—and about their complicity in it. He puts his children to bed not with an apology or a lullaby, but with the stern reminder that “what you saw was how our meat comes to us.”[Read: The books that help me raise children in a broken world]Ayush seems like a monster in this scene—and not an unfeeling one, which signals to the reader that he may be as much tortured as torturer. Mukherjee swiftly makes it apparent that this is the case. We see him begging Luke to help teach their too-young children to weigh the morality of “things that don’t appear to be choices,” such as eating meat; Luke, in turn, begs Ayush to examine the roots of his unhappiness and anxiety, his compulsion to conserve energy far beyond what could reasonably be useful. Ayush yearns to “shake off his human form” and become one with nature—or, more ominously, vanish into it. At one point, Ayush takes his children to explore some woods outside London, an activity that many parents might relate to: He wants to share the wonder of the natural world with his children, both as a bonding activity and as a lesson in ecological stewardship. But he can’t focus on Masha and Sasha. What he hears instead is that the “great trees are breathing; Ayush wants to still his heart to hear them.” Mukherjee only implies this, but it seems that all Ayush’s experiences lead to this paradox: His love for the Earth makes him want to erase himself from it.Ayush’s relationship with his children is also shaped by a desire to remove himself, as well as a significant amount of attendant guilt. He is the twins’ primary parent, despite the fact that he never wanted children—a revelation that Mukherjee builds to slowly. Ayush’s anxieties about choosing parenthood are legion. He’s upset by the ecological impact of adding to the Earth’s human population, and believes that his twins will face a future of walled cities and climate refugeeism. Having grown up South Asian in Britain, he’s frightened of exposing children to the racism he’s faced his whole life; he also has a half-buried but “fundamental discomfort about gay parenting,” of which he is ashamed. Most of all, before having children, he didn’t want to have a baby who could become like him—“a consumed, jittery, unsettled creature.” His own unhappiness, he feels, should have precluded him from having children. Yet he acquiesced, a choice he partly disavows by suppressing his memory of why he did. Not only does he go along with having children; he takes daily responsibility for raising them.On the surface, this is the case because Ayush earns less than Luke, a dynamic the novel explores with nuance. In straight partnerships, the question of who parents more is very often gendered, which Mukherjee acknowledges: At one point, Luke, who has a big job and generational wealth, dismisses Ayush with a sexist reference to the “pin-money” he earns in publishing. But there are more layers here. Ayush, it seems, takes responsibility for his children in order to atone for not having wanted them. Luke, who pushed for fatherhood, is the more patient and affectionate parent, while Ayush is busy fretting over the environmental impact of disposable diapers. Luke is also much kinder and more open to Ayush than Ayush is to him: Although Luke is an economist, with a genuine belief in the rationality that undergirds his discipline, he’s motivated far more by his emotions than his ideas.Ayush believes himself to be the opposite. His domestic decisions are often logical (or logical-seeming) responses to climate anxieties, but this impulse becomes more disturbing as it influences his child-rearing. Sometimes, he seems to care more about raising Masha and Sasha as environmentalists than he does about any other aspect of their upbringing—almost as though he wants to offset having had them to begin with. He doesn’t necessarily want to be this way: After the somewhat-failed forest outing, Ayush takes the twins on a walk around London and teaches them to come up with similes and metaphors to describe what they see, making a game of comparing dandelions to egg yolks and lemons. Here, he successfully keeps his attention on his children, but he still spins a tender moment into one of moral exigency. “Will this remain in their memory,” he wonders, “make them look up and out, make them notice, and, much more importantly, notice again?” For Ayush, this qualifies as optimism. He’s trying to control his children’s way of seeing the world, but he is also trying to offer them the gift of coexisting, happily, with the Earth.[Read: The book that captures my life as a dad]Mukherjee does give Ayush one way of communing peacefully with nature: his relationship with his dog, Spencer. The writer Joy Williams has said that any work of fiction should have an “animal within to give its blessing,” which Spencer certainly does in Choice. Mukherjee describes Ayush’s devotion to his dog in lush detail; the book’s most beautiful passages have Spencer in them. Ayush’s heart breaks when he realizes that Luke does not see “you, me, and the dog” as family enough; it breaks far more deeply when Spencer grows too old to “bound to the door … surprised by joy, impatient as the wind, when any member of his family comes in.” Among Ayush’s most treasured memories is a spring morning with Spencer: Then a puppy, he had rolled in wild flowers so that his “silky golden throat and chest had smelled of violets for a brief second, then the scent had disappeared. Ayush had sat on the ground, sniffing Spencer’s chest for another hit of that elusive perfume, but it was gone.”Ayush plainly sees Spencer as his child, and yet the dog also gives him a way to experience the “elusive perfume” of a pleasurable connection with the planet. As Spencer ages and that link is harder to sense, Ayush’s unhappiness grows. He understands that he is grieving preemptively for Spencer, but the approaching loss of his dog—an event he cannot control or avoid—does not motivate him to snuggle with Spencer or prepare his children for the loss. Instead, it makes him want to leave his family when Spencer does—as if, without the connection to nature that the dog offers, he can no longer bear to be caged in his family home.By the end of his section of Choice, Ayush has completely lost the ability to make rational decisions. He betrays Spencer in a scene perhaps even more painful than the book’s opening, thinking that he’s doing his beloved dog a service; he also betrays his children, his husband, his life. All of his efforts to control his family’s ecological impact, to do the right research and calculations, to impart all the right moral lessons, lead directly, maybe inexorably, to this tragic point. At the novel’s start, he tells Luke that he wants their kids to understand “choices and their consequences.” But it ultimately becomes clear that he can’t accept the consequences of his choice to have children. He can’t save the planet for his children; nor can he save it from them—and so, rather than committing to guiding them into a future he can’t choose or control, he abdicates his responsibility for them.Mukherjee leaves Ayush’s family behind rather than linger on the aftermath of these betrayals. He moves on to two narratives the reader will recognize as parts of books that Ayush edited: first a story about a young English academic who begins meddling in—and writing about—the life of an Eritrean rideshare driver, then an essay by a disillusioned economist who describes the misery that ensues when an aid organization gives a Bengali family a cow that is meant to lift them from poverty, but radically worsens their situation instead. Mukherjee imbues these sections with a propulsive mix of anger and grace, but neither is especially complicated. Emily, the academic, has no one who depends on her, and her odd choices concerning the rideshare driver, Salim, have no real consequences for anyone but herself. Sabita, the mother of the family that gets the cow, is so wholly at the mercy of her material conditions that choice is hardly a relevant concept to her—something that she understands, though the cow-providing “people from the city” do not.Emily’s section primarily serves as a portrait of choice amid abundance. Sabita’s, meanwhile, underscores the central idea of Ayush’s: that our efforts at control are, by and large, delusions. For parents, this can be especially painful to accept. We want our choices to guarantee our children’s safety, their comfort, their happiness. For Ayush, who believes fervently that his twins will grow up to inhabit a “burning world,” the fact that he can’t choose something better for them drives him away from them. By not showing the consequences of Ayush’s actions, Mukherjee leaves incomplete the book’s exploration of parenting. What his abdication means to Masha, Sasha, and Luke is hidden. What it means to the reader, though, is clear. In Choice, there is no such thing as a perfect decision or a decision guaranteed to go right. There are only misjudgments and errors—and the worst of those are the ones that can never be undone.

The monarch visited a cancer center on the first day of his return to public duties and was asked how he has been getting on.

New Jersey's attorney general and Local 54 of the Unite Here union are seeking to dismiss a lawsuit brought by another union aiming to ban smoking in Atlantic City's casinos.

Pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University have barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall. In a video posted by Columbia University student Jessica Schwalb, you can see someone use a hammer to break the glass on a Hamilton Hall door and use a bike lock to seal the entrance.

The comments come as Israel and Hamas are negotiating a ceasefire agreement meant to free hostages and bring some relief to Gazans.

"If you wanted proof that Travis is obsessed and very much in love with Taylor, here," one Swiftie wrote via X. Another joked, "Get a room."

Ex-National Security Agency worker Jareh Sebastian Dalke was sentenced to 21 years after trying to sell classified info to an undercover FBI agent believed to be a Russian official.

Former Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro weighed in on Caitlin Clark's shoe deal with Nike over the weekend. Clark signed the deal after being drafted by the Indiana Fever.

The outcome of a union effort at a Chicago Trader Joe’s is unclear. But the chain is facing NLRB charges over alleged anti-labor tactics at other locations.

Accidentally sealed in an box filled with steel-toed work boots, a Utah cat traveled to a warehouse in Riverside, Calif.

Welsh soccer club Wrexham AFC faces extremely long odds of ever making it to the Premier League, but that isn't stopping the team from chasing its dream.

Just when pressure is needed, the Biden administration is holding off on pushing sanctions in Syria.

Nothing says spring like fresh and floral ’fits, plucked straight from the red carpet. As April showers bring May flowers, we’re bringing you a round-up of rosy pinks, shimmering silvers and bright pastels — from some of your fave celebrities.  From left: Greta Lee in Alaïa at the Virtuosos Awards, Kerry Condon in Louis Vuitton...

Irish designer Simone Rocha is known for the boundless whimsy of her creations, inspired by artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Bourgeois, as well as her father, fashion designer John Rocha.  Those silhouettes have garnered increasing acclaim since Rocha began showing at London fashion week in 2010, culminating in her being tapped a guest designer...

You may know English-American actress Lucy Boynton from the Oscar-winning film “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Netflix original series “The Politician” or her turn as Marie Antoinette in “Chevalier.”  But if you’re a fashion fiend, you’ll recognize the actress for her iconic style. Boynton, who has been out and about promoting her latest film, “The Greatest Hits,”...

Fashion is always an art form — especially on these sculptural styles recently spotted on red carpets. Sydney Sweeney, Chrissy Teigen, Camila Mendes and Taylor Russell all found ingenious ways to style bespoke hardware and daring silhouettes, making unconventional pieces look effortless. From left: Scream queen Sydney Sweeney comes bearing a bouquet of Balmain, while CW...

In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to class—usually late and unprepared.My high-school guidance counselor had had good reason to tell my deflated parents that there was no way I was college-bound: I graduated in the bottom third of my 100-person class at Lourdes Academy in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I had to attend the Menasha extension of the University of Wisconsin, a two-year school, just to smuggle myself into the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, a four-year school in my hometown. A year into that, I was staring at a 1.491 GPA and making the guidance counselor’s case daily, unambiguously, emphatically. I was one more wasted—literally and figuratively—semester away from getting the boot. This article has been adapted from VandeHei’s new book, Just the Good Stuff. Then I stumbled into a pair of passions: journalism and politics. Suddenly I had an intense interest in two new-to-me things that, for reasons I cannot fully explain, came naturally. My twin interests were animated by my innate mischievousness, contrarian impulses, long poker nights, antiestablishment snobbery, and ease with people of all stripes at dive bars. These passions launched me on a wild, wholly unforeseeable ride through presidential impeachments and congressional coups, aboard Air Force One, onstage moderating a presidential debate, inside an Oval Office lunch with Donald Trump, on TV, and at the helm of two successful media start-ups: Politico and Axios.Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than not—at least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.[Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life]An inherent hubris comes in offering this kind of advice, as I do in my new book, Just the Good Stuff. You naturally come off as arrogant or a know-it-all. I am acutely aware of the kind people, awesome family, and twists of fate that landed me here. And I am like so many others: an imperfect, middle-of-the-pack, small-town guy who worked hard, who never lost sight of life’s serendipity, who feels blessed to share with others what others—or life’s face slaps—shared with me.It is nonsense that to shine, you need to go to a fancy school, bootlick bosses, or pay your dues at soul-sucking jobs working for bad people. You do not need to get 1500 on your SAT or to have a sky-high IQ or family connections. You don’t even need sparkling talents. You simply need to want to construct goodness with whatever life throws at you. This starts by grounding yourself with unbreakable core values and then watching, learning, and copying those who do it—and get it—right. But it also includes watching and studying those who screw it up. You need to find your own passions, not have them imposed by others. Then outwork everyone in pursuit of shaping your destiny—your own personal greatness—on your terms, by your measures, at your pace.My own life is littered with mistakes. But I learned something from every dumb move and used it to try to get the big things right. Five decades in, that is what matters most to me: cutting myself slack on my daily sins or stumbles so I can focus on the good stuff. [Read: How to succeed at failure]For me, that list includes pursuing deep, meaningful, unconditional relationships with my kids; a healthy, resilient marriage; strong, loving relationship with my parents and siblings; a few deep and durable friendships; faith and connection beyond myself; and doing consequential work with people I enjoy and admire.I’ve often fallen short of these goals, and so I’ve learned the value of grace. We’re all deeply flawed, wounded, selfish, clueless, and mean at different times. It does not make us bad. It makes us normal. That’s why we need to extend grace to others, and to ourselves.I have blown many months beating myself up for being a selfish husband or an inattentive son or a harsh leader or an absent friend. And all of those things were often true. But life is not measured by a moment. In the end, I want to be able to say what we should all be able to say about ourselves: I learned a little every day, tried to do the next right thing, and got the big things right.This article has been adapted from Jim VandeHei’s new book, Just the Good Stuff.

In an interview with TIME, Trump is sharply critical of Netanyahu and believes others in Israel could replace him.